At least one confused member of the Eclipse community spent an uncomfortable night camping outside the Eclipse Foundation offices in hopes of being the first to get a copy of the new fangled Eclipse packages.

Unfortunately, this camper didn’t realise that we never use the front door, and it wasn’t until quite late in the morning that we noticed him. That, and we don’t really have anything like a CD to hand out. Maybe there’ll be cake later. Mmmmm, cake…

Eclipse Europa is available for download from the Eclipse Downloads page. Look for the new bundled packages which provide a leaner (and more complete) experience for Java Developers, Java EE Developers, and C/C++ Developers (Windows users should take a look at “CDT for Windows“) that includes more of the plug-ins that you need and excludes the stuff (like source code) that you don’t need. There’s also a package specifically for RCP/Plug-in Developers, and—of course—you can still get the most recent release from the Eclipse project.

The EPP project (and Markus in particular) has done a great job of getting these bundled packages out for us all to enjoy. You can just download them (I suppose that I could build you a disc if you really need/want one). Be sure to check out the member company distros; there’s a lot of cool stuff in there as well.

It’s probably time to go and wake up that camper…

My name is Wayne and I have a problem: I don’t really get IRC. That’s not to say that I don’t understand the technology. Heck, I even know a bunch of the more basic commands. I just have a really hard time keeping up with the conversations. My day is very interrupt driven and I find that when I take break from the IRC conversation, it takes me too long to catch up. Maybe I’m just trying too hard.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been trying to stay connected with the conversation on irc.freenode.net/eclipse. I’ve been mostly lurking, but with the excitement of the impending Europa release, the conversations has been riveting (at least for 15 minute increments that I’ve been able to follow).

What’s made hanging around IRC easier is the fact that I’ve been IRC’ing from the comfort of the Eclipse workbench. I loaded the Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) features from the Europa update site (they’re under the “Communications” category) and have been using the “Chats” view to keep an eye on the conversation. One of the things that I plan to explore in the coming weeks is the creation of a ‘bot that will listen to IRC for me and wake me up when the conversation twists in a direction I need to pay more attention to. Remy created a tutorial that’s available here. The tutorial paints a pretty clear picture of what needs to be done; and it looks pretty easy.

Here’s a screen shot of my workbench. The IRC view is at the bottom. The conversation is a little on the slow side at 22h30 before the big release.

As you can see on the top right, I’ve also been playing with the instant messaging and collaboration features (the ECF downloads page contains a pointer to where you can get the Yahoo IM, and Skype integration). It’s pretty cool stuff. Scott created a plug-in that joins ECF and the Sudoku Game I created; it allows folks to collaborate on a puzzle through ECF. It builds on the work that Chris did a while back.

Europa contains some other cool “remote” stuff. I’ve been using the Remote Systems view (bottom left) that is produced by the DSDP TM project. It allows you to browse, copy, and move files to and from remote systems using FTP, SFTP, Telnet, and more. I’ve been using to upload some screencam demonstrations I recorded for the new Europa downloads page (should be active on Friday morning).

All-in-all, there’s some pretty friggin’ cool stuff being produced by Eclipse projects.

Today, we published Miguel Garcia’s article, “How to process OCL Abstract Syntax Trees“, on Eclipse Corner. The abstract states:

The Model Development Tools Object Constraint Language (MDT OCL) project provides the building blocks for Model-Driven tools to weave OCL declarative specifications into software artifacts. We showcase some of these possibilities, taking as starting point a plug-in to visualize OCL abstract syntax trees (ASTs) in the form of annotated trees. This example motivates some practical tips about patterns for OCL visitors, including using Java 5 generics and achieving conciseness by letting MDT OCL take care of the “walking” order. To really reap the benefits of OCL-enriched specifications, tools in our modeling chain have to be able to transform such expressions into the target software platform (e.g. compile into Java, translate into SQL). Work in this area is summarized, to ease jump-starting your own OCL processing project.

This article has me brainstorming how I can use the OCL in an example.

I also added an excellent new book titled “Eclipse Web Tools Platform: Developing Java Web Applications” to the resources page. This book, authored by Naci Dai, Lawrence Mandel, and Arthur Ryman is great source of information about the Eclipse Web Tools project. I spoke with Naci Dai about web tools at EclipseCon; the podcast from that conversation is here.

I’m off to Germany next week for a fun-filled week of Eclipse-based excitement. With the arrival of Europa this week, next week is sure to be a great time to out with the people.

The first event is a visit on Tuesday evening to the Java User Group Cologne where I’ll be participating in what is billed as an “IDE Shoot out”. The agenda doesn’t feel much like a shoot out, but that’s what they wanted to call it. There will be representatives there from several Java IDEs who will be presenting on their various technologies, followed by a panel discussion. It all sounds to be set up as a nice exchange of ideas.

On Wednesday, I’ll be visiting with a few Eclipse member companies to discuss the sort of things they’re doing with Eclipse technologies. These kinds of visits are always fun as the companies in the Eclipse eco-system always seem to be able to impress and amaze me with the innovative ways they extend the software.

On Thursday, I’m presenting two talks at Java Forum Stuttgart. The first talk, Anatomy of an Eclipse RCP Application, is an updated version of the talk that I gave at JavaOne; this time, I’m planning to focus more on the architecture and less on the actual code. I’m a little nervous about the second talk, Task Focused Programming with Eclipse Mylyn (the abstract using the old name, ‘Mylar’), as this will be first time I’ve formally presented on the topic. Fortunately I’m arrogant enough to expect it to go well.

On Thursday night, I’m rushing off to Munich to attend one of Ralph’s celebrated stammtisches (stammtischae?). If you’re going to be in the area, please try attend (July 5 @ 19h30 at the Im Gruental restaurant in Munich).

On Friday, we’re visiting with some more Eclipse member companies, and then Ralph said something about needing a caddy…

If you’re going to be attending any of these events, drop me a note (wayne_at_eclipse_dot_org). I’d love to chat.

…I may just lose it.

I’ve had this darned picture—taken at JavaOne 2007—on my desk for a little more than a month. I keep looking at it and thinking that I should scan it, put it on my blog and then send the original to the shredder.

As I look at this picture, I think several things:

1. What the heck is Duke anyway? It looks like a badly infected (and seriously damaged) incisor.
2. With a little more effort, maybe they could have had Dora the Explorer or Stanley and Dennis (who I understand aren’t doing much since their show was cancelled) there as well
3. Why did they use a Polaroid instant camera rather than digital? (JavaOne: bringing you 1947’s technology today!)
4. Why don’t we do something like this for EclipseCon 2008?

Fortunately, I already know the answer to that last one…

I recently recorded a flash demo of the creation—using annotations—of a web service for JBoss 4.2 using a pre-release of the new Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (the work-in-progress landing page is here). You can find the demo here.

Creating the web service is pretty easy.

I noticed that JBoss requires an entry in the web.xml file for the web service (to be honest, I’ve spent a little too much time away from this technology to know if this is typical of other application servers, or if there is a way to encourage JBoss to work without it). Rather than try to fumble my way through the bits and pieces that are required for an entry in web.xml, I instead just created a servlet. The process of creating the servlet creates entries in the deployment descriptor along with a skeleton of a servlet class.

In the next step, I deleted most of the code generated for the servlet class and reduced it to a simple POJO along the lines of:

package org.eclipse.samples.ws;
import javax.jws.WebService;
@WebService
public class Welcome {
    public String getGreeting(String name) {
        return "Hello " + name;
    }
}

It’s pretty simplistic, but my intent is to show that building a web service is pretty easy, not build an actual interesting web service.

And that’s about it. The next step is to run it, which I do using the Servers view. Eclipse does a great job managing the servers. During the start up, JBoss reports that the web service has started and provides a URL for WSDL generated for it. In my demonstration, I use the Web Services Explorer to play a bit. I could just as easily used the WSDL to create a Java client using the New Web Service Client wizard.

One thing I learned in setting up the demonstration is that JBoss 4.2 (and 5.0) don’t run all that well with Java 6. When I attempted that, I wound up with a bunch of errors that just disappeared when I instead used a Java 5 JRE. Maybe it’s just me.

I’d love your feedback on the demo.

Today we published an article on Eclipse Corner titled, “SWT/Swing Integration”. This is a pretty important topic that is of great interest to a lot of folks. The article was written by Gordon Hirsch, based on some real world experience with the SWT_AWT bridge component (which allows you to host AWT/Swing components in SWT). The abstract of the article states:

Swing and SWT are sometimes seen as strictly competing technologies. Some people have strong opinions on which UI toolkit to use exclusively for client applications. However, in the real world, ideological extremes are often impractical. Some valid use cases require both technologies to coexist in a single application. While mixing the two toolkits is not a simple task, it can be done, and it can be done such that the two toolkits are smoothly integrated. This article discusses the steps necessary to achieve good Swing/SWT integration. It focuses on the use case of embedding existing Swing components into an SWT-based Rich Client Platform application.

You can find the article here.

I’ve been spending far too much time wrestling with Camtasia lately (it has a frustrating habit of completely screwing up my files). I’ve been putting together a collection of screencam demonstrations to accompany the Europa release. I did spend a little effort looking into using Wink to record my demonstrations, and that does seem to have some potential. I’ve also been tinkering with using PHP and Ming to assemble screenshots into flash-based demonstrations, but I had to abandon that effort as we’re just getting too close to the Europa release to be mucking around with that.

Nathan and I have been working on some new download pages that include actual instructions for how to obtain and install Eclipse. I’m quite happy with the new ‘distributions’ of Eclipse being created by the Packaging project (which are nicely complemented by the member company distributions). It’s nice to have an collection of integrated IDE packages for folks who just want to write Java code and don’t need to build plug-ins (and therefore don’t really need the PDE or the source code).

The new site (which will become the official download page on Europa release day, is here. If you follow the links to “More info”, you’ll find the demonstrations that I’ve been working on. They’re not all complete (and so are not all there yet). The Java IDE page is far closer to the final form than any of the others. I’m particularly fond of the installation instructions that detail how to install Eclipse in a shared (i.e. multiple-user) environment and what to do with those annoying requests for a password on Windows. I’d love to hear what you think. Bugzilla is probably the best place to add your comments.

In the process of making a demonstration titled “Adding Features from the Europa Update Site”, I spent a little time with the Ruby Development Tools. I’ve only just started playing with them, but the support has thus far been first class.

I spent the last (you might say ‘better’) part of my day yesterday hanging out with some of my old friends at Oracle, trying to help them get their new Eclipse project up and running. The Eclipse Persistence Services project, which is affectionately known as “EclipseLink” is inheriting some awesome code from Oracle. EclipseLink will provide all sorts of persistence services; the project proposal lists a few of the mechanisms that EclipseLink will provide:

EclipseLink will provide support for a number of persistence standards including the Java Persistence API (JPA), Java API for XML Binding (JAXB), Java Connector Architecture (JCA), and Service Data Objects (SDO).

They also have some stuff that’s a lot more powerful (and flexible) than the standards listed.

The project is in the provisioning stage. It will (of course) have to incubate for a while. So long as the project follows the ‘incubation’ rules, it can benefit from the parallel IP process. This means, that the code will make it into the repository fairly quickly (after a license compatibility check is done), so you should be able to start playing with EclipseLink soon (you’ll have to install some Subversion plug-ins).

A couple of new blogs should soon be added to Planet Eclipse: the EclipseLink Team Blog, and Doug Clarke’s Java Persistence blog. The newsgroup is also ready for your questions.

Yesterday, Ian posted an entry in his blog asking for community help to test a new downloads page that we’d like to realize for the Europa release. On this page are several new distributions of Eclipse. I’ve been testing various version of these packages for a while, and—for a first release—it’s looking pretty good.

Over the last few days, I’ve been reviewing the "Eclipse Tools for Java Enterprise Developers" package. This package contains the tools that you need to build, test, debug, and refactor Java, as well as tools for building applications based on Java EE technologies like servlets, JavaServer Pages, Enterprise JavaBeans, and web services (including support for Java EE 5). It also includes tools for editing HTML, CSS, and XML files, and more.

I’ve used it to all sorts of things including building and deploying applications on Tomcat 5.5 and 6.0, and JBoss 4.2. It all works swimmingly. One wrinkle is that the application servers themselves aren’t part of the package; you have to download and unpack these separately. Mercifully, you don’t have to do any configuration: the Eclipse Web Tools takes care of setting up instances of the application servers for you to test your code against.

Something that’s new is the Web Page Editor. I’ve been using this to touch up some HTML pages on a site that I maintain. I’ve also been tinkering with a few JSPs. I haven’t had the guts yet to try JSF (for some intangible reason, JSF scares me), but apparently that’s supported as well. Here’s a screenshot of the Web Page Editor in action:

It occurred to me to try and force it to work with PHP files (by adding a file association in the preferences), but it didn’t work. The Web Page Editor just doesn’t understand the tags. However, the beauty of having an extensible framework means that extensions to support that sort of thing should hopefully be something we can look forward to in the future.

Overall, I’m happy with the package. I like that it includes Mylar. I like that it doesn’t include the PDE or any of the source code (Java EE developers don’t need these). I’d like to see a future version include Subversion support, but that depends on the Subversive team getting an Eclipse 3.3-compatible release ready.

Bug 187879 has become the rallying point for discussion about our potential new download page; it also contains some discussion about the content of the packages. If you’re interested in helping to improve the Eclipse experience for new developers, please add your comments to this bug. If you find specific problems with any of the packages or just want to add your thoughts about what the existing packages should contain, look for (or contribute new) bugs against the EPP project. Of course, there’s also the EPP newsgroup.

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