Minor changes have been made to the Swordfish WIKI pages. There is now Swordfish for Contributors category and a section under it called, User Documentation for Contributors.

All user documentation aimed at the Swordfish project committers and contributors will be collected there.

All end-user documentation on the use of Swordfish can be found in the Swordfish WIKI pages under the category User Documentation.

For the past few months we have been working on tooling support for Swordfish. This has resulted in an impressive Swordfish tooling project that helps a user to perform various tasks like, Getting Started with Swordfish Tooling and Creating a JAX-WS Service Provider Project from an existing WSDL.

Getting Started with Swordfish Tooling

A quick “Getting Started” section in our help, enables users to set up a Target Platform.

Creating a JAX-WS Service Provider Project from WSDL

We have provided three ways to start this task:

• Using the plug-in project wizard: This is the basic method, by which the user can create a plug-in project using the Eclipse Plug-in Project wizard. After choosing a name for the plug-in project and choosing the necessary template, the user can select the WSDL from the workspace. Alternatively, the user can select the WSDL from the file system. After this the new service provider project is visible in the workspace.

• Using the import wizard: This method involves the Import option in the File menu. After making the selection as shown in the next screen, the steps to be followed are identical to the previous option, “Using the plug-in project wizard”.

• Using the context menu of a WSDL in the workspace: For this method, you must right-click the WSDL and select the Import option. The steps that follow are identical to the previous section, “Using the import wizard”.

During this year’s EclipseCon, I had the pleasure of talking to Michael Coté of Redmonk and giving him an update on Swordfish. The recording is up on the RedmonkTV website. Enjoy!

I’m very happy to announce that we now have a new committer on Swordfish! Zsolt Beothy-Elo has been successfully elected last week and now has full write access to the Swordfish SVN.

Zsolt contributed siginificantly to the Swordfish service registry and will continue to maintain and further develop this crucial component as a committer.

Welcome, Zsolt!

We’re working on the Swordfish wiki pages. We’ve decided to give it a much needed facelift. Please keep keep visiting our wiki pages to keep up with the changes.

Renat Zubairov has posted a short tutorial to his Swordfishing Blog that will guide you through the first steps of installing and building Swordfish, along with a screencast.

Thanks a lot, Renat!

The EclipseCon 2009 Programme Committee has finished its work and created an amazing program! There are so many interesting and exciting sessions, it’s going to be tougher than ever to choose…

Anyway, I’m happy to announce that we’ll have not less than three sessions that are in some way related to Swordfish:

• The first one will be a 4 hour tutorial on Monday at 13:30. As the title “Towards Integrated SOA Development with Eclipse STP and Swordfish” suggests, it’s not exclusively about Swordfish, but rather demonstrates how SOA applications can be developed and run using the tools and runtimes provided by the Eclipse ecosystem. The part on Swordfish will cover the extensibility options Swordfish provides and will walk you through creating your own Swordfish extensions. The tutorial will officially be presented by Adrian Mos from INRIA, Antoine Toulme from Intalio, Gerald Preissler, Renat Zubairov and myself from SOPERA, Oisin Hurley from Progress Software, Stéphane Drapeau from OBEO, and Vincent Zurczak from EBM WebSourcing. I doubt that we’re all going to show up on stage, but it’s great to have a tutorial with folks from so many companies involved — that’s how a community is supposed to work! I suggest you don’t miss it if you’re interested in Eclipse-based SOA development!
• Then we’ll have a 1 hour talk by Dietmar on “Practical Process Orchestration using Eclipse SOA” on Tuesday at 13:30. It’s not obvious from the title where Swordfish comes into play, but we’re going to use Swordfish as the deployment target runtime for processes. Don’t miss it if you’re into process orchestration!
• And finally, Dietmar and me are doing a 1 hour main stage talk on “Eclipse Swordfish — an open source SOA runtime framework for the enterprise”. It’s going to be a mixture of introductory material, some hands-on demos and new-and-noteworthy-type content. Not sure yet how we’ll manage to cram all that into 50 minutes…

Looking forward to seeing all of you in Santa Clara in March!

There has been some confusion lately regarding the relationship between SOPERA and the Swordfish project.

SOPERA GmbH is an open source company that develops, maintains and provides support for an open source SOA solution called SOPERA ASF. SOPERA ASF is based, among other things, on tools from various Eclipse projects, such as WTP and STP. Community support for SOPERA ASF will be provided by the SOPERA community platform which is soon to be launched.

The Swordfish project is an open source project initiated by SOPERA and hosted by the Eclipse Foundation. As of now, there is no direct relationship between SOPERA ASF and Swordfish — but this is going to change. The next major release of SOPERA ASF will be based on Swordfish as the runtime core framework and we’re also committed to moving more and more bits and pieces of SOPERA ASF into Eclipse. If you have questions, issues, suggestions etc. regarding the Swordfish project, please don’t hesitate to post them to the eclipse.swordfish newsgroup or the swordfish-dev mailing list.

I hope this sheds some light on the situation.

Due to the huge amount of spam comments being posted to this blog lately, I had to disable comments for unregistered users. Sorry for that! I hope it’s only temporary.

Good news! After long months of uncertainty, the Eclipse IP team has finally approved our CQs for the Spring Framework which is critical for us mainly because it’s a dependency brought in by ServiceMix.
There were some doubts regarding code provenance that had to be clarified, but communication with the Spring team turned out to be sluggish… anyway, now that it’s resolved I’d like to thanks the IP team and especially Barb for not throwing in the towel and Joel Rosi-Schwartz from the ORMF project for joining forces and approaching SpringSource from a different angle.

I think this is a good day for the Eclipse ecosystem in general, since OSGi and Spring DM is a power combination that anyone can benefit from!