I’ve mentioned previously that Eclipse is coming alive as a place for runtime technology. The last few days have seen some more concrete steps down that path. Last Wednesday the Eclipse RT top-level project had a successful creation review. So over the next few days the project itself will be provisioned and open for business. In the proposal there were 6 projects declaring their intention to move: Equinox, RAP, ECF, Swordfish, Riena and EclipseLink. While the path is now clear for these moves, I wouldn’t expect to see a mad rush. Each project will move at its own pace. After all, several of the projects are shooting to release in the next few months and really don’t need the distraction of messing with repositories, bugs, etc. There are several other projects including eRCP, EILF and Corona that have expressed interest in a new home. Most likely there will be some discussions on this at EclipseCon and on the RT newsgroup in the coming days.

In other news, today we are announcing the creation of an Equinox Community portal. The portal is a recognition that runtime technology at Eclipse spans the entire ecosystem today and will continue to do so tomorrow. We can’t (and actually don’t want to) contain it all in the RT project. The portal is a landing site for people looking to know more about Eclipse in runtime scenarios. It gives you a view of Eclipse through runtime glasses. You can information on the related projects and technologies, demos, tutorial, articles and other resources.

If you are at EclipseCon on Tuesday, come by the Equinox Community talk that Jochen Krause and I (the RT PMC co-leads) are giving. The slides will be on the web and there is a white paper that paints the vision and benefits of the approach we see evolving. Also check out Ian’s post for more info.  (Damn that Ian for posting before me…)

I’m a fan of simplicity. Hopefully that shows through in the Code 9 website.

Each year when the board election comes around I have to remember how it works.

By now everyone eligible should have received a password email enabling them to vote. If you have a password and have not yet voted, please do so now. There’s no point in having an election if people don’t vote.

Now, if you do not have a password but think you are eligible to vote, read on…

Only members can vote.

Who is a member? Well, committers who work for a member company or those independent committers who have signed individual committer membership papers.

Apparently some very small number of independent committers go through the process of becoming a member. You should. Its pretty easy. I recently left IBM and became an independent committer. Walking the process to become a member took about 10 minutes and most of that was the time to print and fax the forms.

These forms are different from the committer paperwork that you filled out. Membership is not automatic.

If you hurry, you might be able to get the forms in and processed in time to vote. Why bother? Well, for one, your vote will count for as much as all of IBM’s, Oracle’s, Intel’s, … Votes from committers at member companies are aggregated down into one vote so us independents wield just as much power as the big guys.

This is a bit off my normal discourse but, well, it may be of service to someone out there.  I recently (yesterday) received a new Lenovo T61p laptop.  Sweet.  1920×1200 screen, fast processor, big drive, …  I’ve spent the past couple days installing stuff and getting it setup. For the most part it has gone swimmingly.  For the most part.

Last night around 1230 I was finishing up some installs and decided to go to bed.  As is my custom I suspended the laptop, got up from the desk and headed off.  There was the normal “going to sleep beep” and as I walked away, the machine beeped again.  It was waking up.  Strange.  It had been suspending fine earlier. 

This sequence was repeated again and again over the following 1.5 hours always with machine waking up.  I tried all manner of things (wake on lan settings, turning off wireless, …).  No joy.  I was starting to believe that it was the physical act of getting up and leaving that was causing the machine to wake.  Enough.  Haunted laptop?  I turned the machine OFF and went to bed incredulous and confused.

This evening the experiments continued.  In the end, after another 2 hours of suspend and resume experiements witnessed by an outside observer (wife), the problem was tracked down to a combination of a power management setting on the Mouse Device and my chair!  No kidding, the chair. 

The mouse was set to “Allow this device to wake the computer”.  Makes sense that that would be a problem but I was being very careful not to touch the machine in any way thoughout the experiments.  In fact, wiggling the mouse, banging the desk, … did NOT wake the machine.

That’s where the chair comes in. It turns out that my chair makes a bit of a thunk sound when I get up and that particular vibration was triggering a mouse button/wheel and waking the machine.  Unplug the mouse (before suspend), OK.  Get up slowly/quietly, OK.  Mouse plugged into any of the three USB ports and the machine wakes up when I stand.  Again, I kid you not.

There is probably a lesson in there somewhere about assumptions and side effects.  I prefer to just suspend the machine and walk away shaking my head at how complex things are.

I tried to come up with some jokes and humorous stuff to put in this post but nothing seemed to work. So here it is, straight out…

After a lot of thought I have decided to leave IBM. I’m leaving the team after more than two decades of enjoyable, challenging and exciting work first at OTI then, after the acquisition, at IBM. As you can imagine this was not an easy decision. Many of the people in the world I continue to call OTI are friends from university and we literally grew up together. From covert beginnings in a townhouse (the only one on the block with 10Base5 networking) just across from where I live now to chocolate mousse at Montebello to acquisition and assimilation by Big Blue. We have been though a lot together. I will certainly miss them.

But wait, I am not leaving entirely; I am not leaving Eclipse. As one of the people who developed the first prototype before it was Eclipse, I am deeply committed to the technology and the community. So much so that I am putting my money where my mouth is and starting a company around enabling success with Eclipse, Equinox and Eclipse in the runtime space. To that end, my plan is to stay involved in Eclipse both as a committer and my current project leadership roles.

One of my goals is to drive still more participation in Eclipse whether it is me personally, my company or vicariously through others. As with the evolution of Eclipse in the RCP space, we are now entering the runtime space and Equinox is particularly well-positioned to make a real impact.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, yes, I am planning to run for re-election to the Eclipse Board of Directors. My work there over the past two years has been extremely rewarding. I learn something with every board interaction and believe I am having a real impact on the board and the quality of life at Eclipse.

So, exciting times ahead. Look for me at EclipseCon or out on the boat with my kids.

Recently I was reviewing the Equinox project, the direction and the community around it.  One of the things that stood out for me is that Tom Watson has been quietly leading vast swaths of the activity in Equinox from the framework and service implementations to the OSGi spec work and areas in between.  Not only does Tom produce great code and designs but he has a great sense of the community and repeatedly performs heroic feats to meet their needs.

It is with great pleasure then that the Eclipse PMC invited Tom to co-lead the Equinox project and he accepted.  Congratulations Tom and thanks for all the great work!

I was pretty excited to be on the EclipseCon program committee again this year. It’s interesting to see all the different submissions and talk with the other PC members, getting their insights as to what is important and interesting. This year I was completely blown away with the volume and high signal-to-noise ratio of the talk submissions.

An initial set of acceptance messages has been sent out and we are hoping to get some more space so some additional talks can be accepted. The first draft of the program is available as a list of talks (scheduling has not been done).  You can click on the track names to get this list of talks in a particular area (e.g., OSGi DevCon, RCP or Eclipse as a Platform). Early registration is open and presents a huge cost savings (hint hint).

See you there.

Seems like we’ve had a real run on summits lately. Equinox and CDT summits, the Eclipse Summit Europe, OS Summit Asia is coming up and now the Eclipse Summit on Runtime Technologies and Platforms is being planned. The casual observer could quite reasonably be confused by all this summiting. Let me explain a bit about the latest Runtime Summit.

First, it is becoming clear that Eclipse has a lot of really significant runtime related technology in its projects. I recently asked Eclipse committers to list the runtime related work in their projects on the Runtime Technology Catalog wiki page. Within hours the page had quite a few entries and I’m sure there are still more to come. Looking over the list you see things like Equinox (of course), ECF, EclipseLink, RAP, SwordFish, Riena, eRCP, … In many cases these are significant chunks of production quality code specifically for aimed at runtime scenarios.

Having noticed this trend, the Foundation and a few project leads thought it would be a good idea to get together the interested parties and plot a course for what clearly is an accelerating trend. And so the Runtime Summit was born.

The main goal of the summit is to understand and coordinate the various Eclipse runtime technologies. What technologies do we have at Eclipse today? What is coming? How are they related? What is happening in these technologies? How will they affect other parts of Eclipse? How can the Eclipse community be mustered to make the most of these trends? All of these are questions we hope to discuss at the summit.

This event is not intended to be a technical discussion (well, lets be real, we’re techies so that is inevitable but it is not the driving purpose). Rather, a higher level survey, coordination, strategy discussion between stakeholders. If you think you are one of these stakeholders and would like to contribute concretely to this event, check out the registration details on the summit wiki page.

Note that this has been a bit late coming together. The deadline for discounted hotel bookings is actually today!

See you there…

I had every intention of blogging during and after the Equinox Summit earlier this week. As it turned out, things were way too interesting and the conversation far too engaging for me to get even a couple minutes to dash off a note or two. For those who don’t know what I am talking about, the Equinox team and the Eclipse Foundation held a two day “summit” involving current Equinox committers and contributors as well as a number of key consumers of Equinox technology.

We were worried that with about 35 participants the group was a bit large for dynamic discussions. In the end we used a format that called for a series of 1 hour break-out sessions followed by plenary summaries and further discussion. This worked really well in my opinion. By having the group pick the session topics we pretty much ensured there was something for everyone all the time (thus no blogging time :-)  The results of the summit are captured as a series of presentation slides and breakout session reports.

The N things I took away from the summit:

1. p2, the new provisioning platform is hot on people’s minds
2. Server-side Eclipse via both the Equinox server work and simply Equinox/OSGi on the server is impacting people today
3. PDE is not done yet
4. Component programming models (e.g., Eclipse extension registry, OSGi services, Declarative services, Spring, SAT, …) are at the center of it all so w’d better get it right

The next stop for Equinox enthusiasts is the Eclipse Summit Europe where there will be a Server-Side Symposium and a Provisioning Symposium.  See you there!

Philippe posted earlier today with some sad news.  Plug-in is still plug-in and not plugin.  But wait Philippe, not all is lost!  Plug-in == Bundle!  So good-bye plug-in (and plugin for that matter) and hello bundle.  Use it in your code, with your friends, in documentation and presentations.  It’s simple, easy, shorter and has no pesky horizontal lines.