This is just too cool. The ECF guys (in particular Mustafa Isik) have some up with a system for real-time shared editing mechanism called Cola. I’ve not tried it myself but the screencast they put together is so compelling that I had to stop watching it and post this! Check it out. Very cool. And the HD mode on the video is awesome. Well done guys.
p.s., yes I realize that I used “cool” three times in this short post. What can I say…
For what I believe is the first time in the history of the Eclipse Foundation we are changing the by-laws. What has prompted this? Effectively the success of Eclipse has changed the dynamics around membership. The current membership structure does not match with what members are looking for. The Board has come up with a new structure and the Foundation has produced an excellent page of information describing the changes and detailing the reasons.
To me the key thing is that under the new model we offer more opportunity for members to express their committment to Eclipse and get value from Eclipse. That in turn means revenue that more accurately reflects the value of Eclipse and, in the end, better services for the community. Everyone wins.
So, what does this mean to you? First, it means that you MUST vote. These changes require super-majority (two-thirds plus one) approval of the Membership-at-Large to become effective. If you are eligible to vote (all committers and member representatives get a vote), you will have already received an e-mail with your voting information. It is dead easy. Two clicks. If you did not get voting information but think you should have, contact the foundation.
It is vital that you vote. If you do not vote then you are, in fact, voting no. This is bad. Your apathy will prevent the progress of the Eclipse community. The Committer Reps are strongly in favor of these changes and urge you to vote and to vote YES.
As mentioned elsewhere (here here here), the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors election results are in. I am very pleased to have been re-elected for another term. I mentioned in my vision statement that working on the board is extremely educational and gratifying. Gaining the support of the community to do that work is doubly so. Thanks to everyone who voted and to the other candidates for making it an interesting process.
I have to say however that I am bummed that Howard Lewis, a long time elected add-in provider representative, chose not to run again this year so tomorrow will be his last board meeting. It is our loss. Thanks Howard for many years of great service to the Eclipse community.
You know those times when you are blissfully away from email and you come back and all hell has broken loose? That’s me today as I read the various posts and messages about e4. Hopefully the following will help make things better rather than making them worse…
First, to dispel some myths.
Ok, so what’s happened here? At least part of it is a miscommunication/misunderstanding around the creation of an “e4″ component in the Eclipse Project Incubator. That component is NOT e4. So what is it? Aside from being unfortunately named, it is a place to put the demo code and random hackings that would be used to facilitate discussions around creating an e4 proposal and interesting EclipseCon talk.
There is no doubt that the Eclipse project team has a reputation for being closed. Being more open has been one of our goals for the past couple years. There has been good progress but there is still a ways to go.
In any event, it is actually the, perhaps clumsy, implementation of the desire to be open and create the open community structures (e.g., projects) that has gotten us here.
Early on there was discussion around branching the platform code in-place, doing the work in a set of Eclipse project incubator components, … We quickly saw that making a full-on project was the only right direction.
In the normal process of creating a project
An individual or group of individuals declares their interest in, and rationale for, establishing a project. The EMO will assist such groups in the preparation of a project Proposal.
So the current incubator component and all discussions up to now have really been focused on getting to the point of proposing a project. Not on actually doing the work.
Once a project is proposed
The proposers, in conjunction with the destination PMC and the community, collaborate in public to enhance, refine, and clarify the proposal.
So the proposal is the real beginning of collaboration, community building and the work.
The communication around, and creation of, the e4 component confused things and was (reasonably) perceived as saying “here is e4 and these people are working on it and there is a direction and …”. Its all done so to speak. In reality it is none of the above.
It could be (and has been) reasonably argued that more communication in the pre-proposal phase would have been the way to go. In retrospect, that looks like wise advice.
With mea culpas, clown noses and red faces all around the team, I propose that we, collectively, all of us, attempt to reset our thinking and perceptions, and make the reality be a completely open, innovative and interesting e4 project that takes Eclipse to the next level.
I was thinking the other day, “Why am I running for re-election in the current Eclipse Board elections?” It’s really quite a bit of work. There are monthly phone calls, quarterly face to face meetings, committees and working groups, prep for all of the above, … Oh my!
All in all I figure it takes at least 5 days a quarter just to keep up. If you want to help drive things, well, you could easily double that. When you figure there are about 50-55 work days in a quarter (depending on your location’s holiday calendar and your vacation time), that’s at least 10% of your normal work time!
So what’s up with that? We have 8 dedicated committers all willing to contribute still more of their time to help run the foundation. Why?
I can’t answer for the others but I can list some of the reasons I’m on the list.
Anyway, we’d be here all day. There are more reasons and many are outlined in my vision statement. The point is, as I went through the list, I quickly realized that being on the board is a huge opportunity that excites and inspires me. That is why I am willing to donate this time.
Eclipse is many things that are good and can be many other great things. The Board of Directors’ mission is:
“to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of [Eclipse]”
There is no better place to be than on the board, if you want to have a hand in shaping the larger Eclipse world. I look forward to another term on the board and more interaction with the entire Eclipse community.
I remember a few weeks ago seeing a message about the Memory Analyzer project proposal. Some guys from SAP were going to open source some of their tooling to analyze Java heap dumps. I didn’t think much about it at the time other than “Hey, that’s probably a good idea”. The other day however, Andreas Buchen, the proposed project lead contacted me about being a mentor so I took a deeper look at what they are proposing.
There is a bunch of info on the SAP Wiki and Andreas has summarized it well in a newsgroup post. This is really cool! Their tool allows you to do all manner of queries and introspection of heaps. You can look for leaks (why is that object still there?), check memory consumption (aka retained size), create your own queries, etc.
The real kicker for me was the classloader relative searching. Under the covers, Equinox makes a classloader for every bundle. So searches by classloader are just a step away from searches by bundle. This puts the tooling in a much better context for Eclipse developers and, for example, lets you figure out what your bundle is doing with memory etc.
The other thing that is cool is its scalability. They routinely work on multi-GB dumps and have a whole range of instant queries and fast approximations.
The Memory Analyzer project is quite niche and may not attract that many developers (there is lots of potential for people adding extensions) but as part of the broader suite of JDT and TPTP tooling it is a big win and will attract lots of users. I encourage you to check out the proposal and show your support on the newsgroup. Also, you might want to attend their talk at EclipseCon.
p.s., Don’t forget early registration for EclipseCon ends on Feb 14. Spend your money on your loved ones not late registration for the conference.
What the heck? “Eclipse” and “runtime” in the same sentence? Most people think of Eclipse as a tooling thing. Or perhaps an RCP thing. Well, take a look at the EclipseCon program and you will see that Eclipse is that and a whole lot more. I thought selecting talks on the program committe was hard but choosing which talks to actually attend is going to be even harder!
To see what I mean, go to the EclipseCon site and pick any of the days on the left. Then scroll down to the track selector and check only Eclipse as a Platform, OSGi DevCon and Rich Client Platform. Now look at the program. It doesn’t matter what day you pick, you will be double or triple booked pretty much the whole time. It is going to be a very busy week.
To make matters harder, I found many talks related to runtimes and platforms that did not fit nicely into the canned tracks. Here are a few that caught my eye:
Ok the last one is tooling and I am biased by involvement but how could a runtime guy not jump with joy about tooling that helps makes your modules more modular and backward compatibility a reality?
Anyway, all up I counted about 25 long talks (including those above) and about 40 short talks related to Equinox, Eclipse in various runtime/platform guises, OSGi, etc. Hope a lot of them are being recorded…
Don’t miss the fun, go register before the Valentine’s Day deadline and spend the money you saved on something for that someone special. See you there.
Oh, and for you committers out there, don’t miss the Committer Hackathon on all week. Get your team together and hack like crazy.
It is that time of year again — the elections for your committer and add-in representatives to the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors is here. This year the list of candidates is most impressive. Last year the committer rep candidate list was unfortunately dominated by IBMers (including me!). This year less than half the candidates are from IBM and Mik and me are from small Eclipse-related startups (yes, I left IBM). The better breadth of experience and focus is greater this year as well. There are candidates from the embedded, web and tooling platform areas of Eclipse. It would be good to have more than me waving the runtime flag but that will come as Eclipse broadens this year.
Regardless of what part of Eclipse you focus on, please check out the various mission statements and see which fit best with where you think Eclipse is and where it should be going. The coming year is going to be very exciting with lots of new projects, directions and challenges. Voting in the election is one way that you can help shape those changes. Voting starts on February 25th and goes until March 7th.
Ottawa is unusually quiet today. People are burrowing in for a winter storm that is coming up from the US. A quote from Environment Canada
A low pressure area over Arkansas is getting organized and setting its sights on southern Ontario
I would have thought that the Arkansans would be too busy organizing Super Tuesday to bother sending weather up here!
One group of Ottawa inhabitants that is apparently not going to experience a storm is the Foundation IP team. Last year 154 non-EPL Contribution Questionnaires (CQs) were submitted to IPzilla in the month of January. 122 of those were submitted on the 30th or 31st! While past performance does not necessarily represent the future gains, the team has been stocking up on water, Tums and crates of patience. It may be all for naught. As of a few minutes ago only 75 CQs had been submitted for the entire month and the queue has only 58 pending.
This is great if its for real. Its bad if there is a storm brewing just out of radar/satellite range. The day is not over until midnight but it seems unlikely that committers around the world are poised to submit an onslaught of CQs. More likely is that committers and project leaders have forgotten about the deadline. Also possible is that we have simply identified and cleared all the interesting third-party code out there. Uhhh, no.
Seriously folks, if you have not submitted CQs for the things that you think you will need for Ganymede, please do so now. The IP team really needs to know what they are dealing with over the next few months so they can schedule and prioritize accordingly.
The other day RedMonk analyst Michael Coté and I chatted about Equinox, OSGi, components and what it means to use components to building modular systems. We had a great time and ended up with a two part videocast. The first part is a discussion about the technologies and issues while the second is a demo of how to structure component based code using a real-world example from p2, the new provisioning work in Equinox.
Since these are screencasts you might want to view it in full-screen mode. A wide range of formats including MP4 and audio only are available on blip.tv for both part 1 and part 2.