The call for participation in the Eclipse Summit Europe (ESE) Symposia is out. The symposia will be held on October 9th, the day before the start of the conference which runs October 10th and 11th. Seven sessions are planned:

• Application Provisioning hosted by Jeff McAffer and Tim Webb
• Eclipse Modeling hosted by Jean Bezivin and Markus Voelter
• Integrating Test-Driven Development in the development process hosted by George Mesesan and Christine Mitterbauer
• Open Financial Market Platform: Services for a Banking Platform hosted by Fabian de Keyn and Stephan Wilczek
• RCP Experience Workshop hosted by Christian Wege and Wayne
• Server Side Eclipse hosted by Frank Gerhardt and Jochen Hiller
• Systems Engineering for Device Software Development hosted by Doug Gaff and Hendrik Höfer

Position papers should be sent directly to the symposium leads (email addresses are provided on the symposia page). The suggested format (symposium leads have been given some freedom with the format) is described here. We intend to follow the suggested format in the "RCP Experience Workshop". If you have questions about the format send a note to the symposium lead.

Something new we’re adding this year is podcasts with a representative from each symposium to discuss their results.

I look forward to seeing you at the conference!

In July, we posted an updated version of In Harmony with Eclipse (I say we, but Alexey did the work). This new version features the Eclipse SDK 3.3 on top of Harmony 5.0M2. There are downloads for Windows and Linux.

The Harmony developers are working hard to make their runtime environment fully functional; and they’re doing a great job of it. I’ve been able to run Eclipse and Tomcat using it for months. The best part is that the Harmony developers are actively trying to identify and fix problem spots. A recent note on the cdt-dev mailing list is just one example of the Harmony developers reaching into our community to help solve problems.

The moral of the story is that if you’re having a problem with Harmony, report it.

The Eclipse Europa Reviews Contest results are in. I know that we promised three winners, but we decided in the end that there needed to be four. There were so many submissions in many different languages; it was hard to narrow the selection down to just four. I blogged previously about the selection process that the esteemed judges followed in the selection process.

The grand prize winner is BGE’s Killer Blog… of Justice. The judges all agreed on one critical point: we like the fruit hat. We also appreciate the fact that he’s very clear about having written the blog to win an Eclipse T-shirt. The review is both positive and negative about his Europa experience. The review is good: it hits just the right amount of detail to learn what Europa is and what it can do for you. For his first-place finish, Benoit Goudreault-Emond wins some Eclipse swag and a free (but non-transferable, non-refundable, non-exchangeable, yadda, yadda, yadda,…) pass to either Eclipse Summit Europe (ESE) 2007 or EclipseCon 2008. Sorry Benoit, travel is not included…

In second place, Leaving Callisto and all Aboard for Europa is well-structured and very articulate. The author, Ron Charron, touches on areas he’s concerned with (primarly Model-Driven Design) and makes several excellent arguments in favor of Europa. In third place, Europa, My Top 10 List by Ian Bull is an enjoyable read. The best part of this article is that it makes the reader curious enough to download Europa and see what he’s talking about. In fourth place, Chris Aniszczyk’s A whirlwind tour of Eclipse Europa is succinct, informative and gets the reader interested. It’s a long article with a lot of content covering all of the projects in Europa.

Congratulations to the winners. Lynn will be sending out your prizes shortly (if she hasn’t already). Given that Chris already has enough Eclipse swag to clothe a small country, we may opt to donate his prize to charity…

I’ve been doing a little work on a problem that we’ve been having with our WordPress implementation at blogs.eclipse.org. The problem is that file uploads don’t work. That is, you currently can’t upload useful things like pictures to make your blog entries all pretty and stuff. I finally managed to sneak a peek at the logs which pointed me to the point in the code that causing the problem. It’s down deep in some PHP code.

The WordPress implementation isn’t like the other parts of the website I work on: it’s not in CVS, and is therefore a little harder to get at. That said, it’s a little harder, but Eclipse—of course—steps up and makes it just a little easier.

I’m using the Remote Systems view (provided by the DSDP TM project and available on the Europa Update Site) to browse via SFTP into the server. From there, I navigate to the file I need to edit, and double click which automatically downloads the file and opens a PHP editor (provided by the PDT). In the editor, I make the necessary changes and save which writes the changes back to the server. No muss, no fuss. It’s just done.

This may seem a little odd to folks in the know, but I look forward to receiving mail from IPZilla, the system that Eclipse developers use to submit code for IP review by the Eclipse Foundation. Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of notifications about contribution questionnaires (CQ) submitted for Eclipse IP review. Code checked into Eclipse CVS is subject to IP review. The conditions under which a CQ is required for original code are a tad complex; however, the rules are a little easier to understand for third-party supplied libraries. when an Eclipse project uses third-party libraries, each one of them has to be checked for IP cleanliness (essentially, all the code has to be verified to actually be owned by whomever claims copyright, and licenses have to be checked to make sure that the code is compatible with the EPL). It’s a big job for all involved.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time with Sharon Corbett—who spends most of her day rooting through the code—learning about the process and how I—as a member of the Technology PMC—can help. As a Technology PMC member, one of my responsibilities is to sign off on the CQs pertaining to the Technology Project. The main role I play is to validate that the CQ makes sense technically. But it extends beyond that. My role is to make sure that all the required information is provided.

A CQ needs to have certain information. If you’re submitting a library for review, you need to clearly indicate the name and version of the library. Unfortunately, most JARs don’t actually contain the version number in the manifest, so in some cases, you have to hunt this down. If the exact same version of the library has already been passed by another CQ, you can just reference the other CQ (this tends to result in fairly quick approval). If the specific version of the library is not the subject of another CQ, you must to attach the source code. The IP folks don’t really care too much about the binaries, but they cannot proceed without the source. Ideally, the source code will contain information about the license under which it is distributed. If it does not, you’ll also have to sort this out.

A common mistake is to submit more than one library as part of a single CQ. If the library you need references other libraries, they must each be submitted for review under their own CQs (and each must have the appropriate source code available).

If you don’t have all this information, you might as well not bother to submit the CQ, since the only possible result is a request that you provide it. It can be very frustrating, but all this information is needed: code that goes into Eclipse source code repositories needs to be reviewed so that adopters of the technology can be confident that the code they’re using is clean and won’t result in legal complication down the road.

Anyway, it’s been a great learning experience for me (and there’s still so much more to learn). Sharon has been very helpful.

I’ve spent a good chunk of the past few days reviewing the reviews. Ian has blogged several times about our little competition to award Europa reviewers with some Eclipse SWAG and a conference pass (for one lucky winner). I thought that I’d spend a few minutes discussing my selection process before we announce the winners.

First, I’d like to congratulate those among you who figured out that all you needed to do was string a few coherent sentences together to get a shirt. Honestly, I respect this sort of behaviour. While you have my admiration, you shouldn’t count on getting the grand prize (but I’m sure that you expected that).

Second, since there were so many great reviews to choose from, I decided to try select those reviews that captured the essence of Europa. My ideal review is one that discusses how the project teams worked together to bring improved coherency to the various offerings. A couple of reviews came close to this. My lesser ideal review is one that discusses more than one project. There were several more of these.

Finally, as there were so many reviews to choose from, I organized them according to substance. I looked for reviews that conveyed useful information that goes beyond what is captured in “New and Noteworthy” documentation.

Many of the reviews were not in English. It was cool to see reviews in Chinese, German, French, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. I had these reviews translated as well as electronic tools could manage. Given that translation technology still isn’t quite “there” (Polish to English translation is apparently harder than most other languages), I decided that grammar and spelling should not be a factor, even for those reviews written in English.

One thing about the reviews that bothered me was how many people think that Europa == Eclipse 3.3. The Eclipse project’s version 3.3 is included as part of Europa, but it is just a part of the Europa release.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who submitted their reviews. The short list has been created and has been passed on to a second judge who will decide the order of the finalists. We should (hopefully) be announcing our decision in the next day or so. Stay tuned.