After carefully editing out the “Oprah Incident“, I’ve posted a new podcast of my recent discussion with Stephan Wilzcek about the Open Financial Market Platform Workshop: Services for a Banking Platform workshop that he is co-hosting at Eclipse Summit Europe.

The podcast should show up on EclipseLive (and the RSS feed) sometime tomorrow. In the meantime, it is available here.

Oprah Winfrey joined a call I was on today. It was very exciting. You should be excited too!

I was recording a podcast today with Stephan Wilczek, discussing his upcoming workshop at Eclipse Summit Europe when my microphone cut out and Stephan was regaled with the soothing sound of Oprah and her guests (sadly, there were no short mega-actors jumping on couches). For various reasons which all make perfect sense, I was recording the Podcast via Skype on my workstation at home. The same workstation is set up to record Oprah every day for my wife (which she watches and then deletes). It happens in the background, so I tend to forget about it. Just like I did today. Anyway, we were chugging along and then 4:00pm rolled around and hilarity ensued.

The podcast should be available sometime this evening (after I edit out Oprah).

Stephan, Oprah. Oprah, Stephan.

Eclipse Summit Europe is almost here and I’ve been thinking a lot about the symposia and workshops running on Tuesday, October 9th. More specifically, I’ve been thining about the results. These symposia and workshops offer a great opportunity for like-minded folks to get together and discuss what’s good, what’s bad, and what we as a community can do to make things better.

One of the things that I want to do with the RCP Experiences Workshop is gather a list of ideas, requirements, thoughts, musings, and more from the community and use them as a starting point for the development of a strategy and plan for improving the Rich Client Platform (RCP) experience.

I expect that some of the results will end up as new requirements directed to the Platform project, but as I’ve stated before, I don’t think that it’s reasonable to expect the Platform project to do everything. A strategy for moving forward with the RCP experience might involve the proposal of a new project that creates target runtimes and tool suites for RCP development. Consider, for example, a “runtime” package that includes the RCP as a base, but also includes the EMF and ECF runtimes (along with, possibly, some Orbit packages, like Derby). The package might also include the currently-incubating EclipseLink project. Maybe the output is some Buckminster scripts that pull the various bits together more dynamically. At this point, I’m only musing, but something like this might be a useful result of the workshop.

It feels to me that it has potential to be the start of something big, bold and new. Remember that, to attend the RCP Experience Workshop, you only need to show up; no position paper is required.

On Monday, I spoke with Christine Mitterbauer about the upcoming “Integrating Test-Driven Development in the Development Process Symposium” at Eclipse Summit Europe (ESE). Christine, who is a senior software engineer with MicroDoc, is co-leading the symposium with George Mesesan, also from MicroDoc.

In the podcast, Christine discusses some of the background that lead up to MicroDoc’s decision to pursue Test-Driven Development, the format of the symposium, and how you can get involved.

The podcast should show up on EclipseLive (and the RSS feed) sometime tomorrow. In the meantime, you can listen to it here (Boris, I reduced the encoding quality which significantly reduced the file size).

I’m not sure if this is diversity at work or not, but have you been watching the Visual Editor Project’s (VEP) Project’s ve-dev list lately?

The project-that-could seems to be gathering steam. There’s not what I would call a huge amount of activity, but there seems to be a steadily growing amount of activity. And, while messages a few months ago were along the lines of “is the project dead?”, the messages now seem to be real developers talking to real developers about how they’re going to solve real problems. Frankly, it’s exciting. Of course time will tell how successful this effort will be, but really cool to watch what could be the tipping point for a real project success story.

There appears to be a lot of diversity at work here. There’s several committers, all from different organizations, working together. There’s a few names that many of us will recognise, but there’s some new blood in there also. I said it before, but I’m going to say it again; I’m darned excited about this project. With all these people involved, I want to be involved. I’ve been looking over the bug list to see where I might be able to help. If you want to be able to say “you were there when ve hit the tipping point” you should take a look too! And, of course, don’t forget about September’s Bug Day; there could be a little something more than just bragging rights in it for you…

You’ll notice a change if you subscribe to the podcasts feed off the Eclipse Resources page. I’ve set up a redirect that will point you instead to the podcasts feed on Eclipse Live (which, I hope you will agree is a better place for podcasts anyway). Over the next few days, I’m going to remove the podcasts from Eclipse Resources (after ensuring that they’re all present and accounted for on Live).

I’ve been hacking at this migration on and off for a few days, trying to figure out how to build a proper Apache redirect/rewrite/whatever that can redirect the request using the proper protocol (I want our iTunes users to benefit from the redirect). In the end, I wound up just scripting a redirect into the original PHP file. Not as glamorous, but it does the job.

If you notice anything not working properly, be sure to report it.

I hear a lot of good stuff about Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP). I also hear some criticism. Perhaps the most popular criticisms that I’ve heard has to do with the scope of RCP. Some members of the community have the opinion that RCP doesn’t go far enough. It’s concerned, they say, exclusively with issues of user interface. They say that higher-level support for things like persistence, communication, domain-specific models, and so on are necessary. Some even suggest that RAD tools would be nice. Strictly speaking, it isn’t true that RCP is exclusively concerned with user interface issues since RCP also provides a kick-butt component model thanks to the Equinox project, extreme extensibility, built-in update support, and so on (but who am I to argue with these rather abstract members of the community?)

I agree. All that would be nice. The funny thing is that we do already have much of the desired functionality. But what do we do about it? I’d love to learn your opinion on the topic.

In that spirit, we’re running the RCP Experience Workshop at Eclipse Summit Europe (ESE). If you’ve got experience building RCP applications, we’d love to have you there. If you’re thinking of starting with RCP, we’d also love to have you there. Heck, if you’re just remotely interested in RCP, I’d still love to meet you (even if you can’t make it to the workshop).

I have some simple goals for the workshop. I’d like to know what we can do to make the RCP experience better for everybody. I’d like to discuss how we might go about driving change (we can’t expect the Eclipse project to do all the work).

With a tip of the hat to Nick who is quite a lot better at this than I am, and an apology to Dire Straits…

Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it
You write your software with the PDT
That ain't workin' that's the way you do it
PHP for nothin' and scripts for free

Driving in this morning, I thought it’d be easy to do the whole song. It turns out that it was hard enough to just do the first verse.

The Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) version 1.0 was officially released today with much fanfare. I’ve been using the project for a while, and have been quite happy with the milestone releases. I’ve only just started using the 1.0 release version, but I’m expecting rich PHP development goodness.

Getting the PDT is relatively easy. Hook your Eclipse update manager to the update site http://www.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/updates and you’re off to the races. I did, however, hit a snag on my first attempt to update the PDT feature. Here’s the error I received:

Unable to complete action for feature "PDT Feature" due to errors.
  The File
"/tmp/eclipse/.update/1190126576046/1190126576047/eclipse52269.tmp"
is not a valid JAR file. [error in opening zip file]
  error in opening zip file
  The File
"/tmp/eclipse/.update/1190126576046/1190126576047/eclipse52269.tmp"
is not a valid JAR file. [error in opening zip file]
  error in opening zip file

After some careful inspection, it turns out that the names of the PDT plug-in files, coupled with some unfortunate default web server/PHP configuration, is the culprit. What’s happening is that some of the mirror web servers see a request to download files like org.eclipse.php.core_1.0.0.v20070917.jar and interpret it as a request that needs to be handled by php (it’s the “.php” in the name). The Eclipse Webmasters have fixed our configurations to deal with this and so have some of the mirrors; but not all mirrors have made the fix yet. So you may see this error (or one just like it) when you tray to install.

We’re working on a long term solution (see Bug 203794), but in the meantime, your best bet for successfully installing or updating PDT is to force the update manager to use a mirror that doesn’t suffer from this problem (like download.eclipse.org). You can tell Eclipse to stop automatic mirror selection by turning off the checkbox on the “Install/Update” page in the the preferences

I noticed today, while browsing through Eclipse Plug-in Central (EPIC), that CloudGarden has released a new version of their Jigloo SWT/Swing GUI Builder. Jigloo, which can be easily added to your Eclipse-based IDE via update site, provides support for building user interfaces in SWT or Swing. It supports the construction of Eclipse views and editors, and Swing Application Framework components. It also supports the relatively new GroupLayout layout (which requires Java 6). Of course it also supports round-tripping (so that when you make changes in the source code, those changes are immediately reflected in the visual editor).

I’ve been playing with it all morning, and it has been very robust. I’m not currently working on any projects that require complicated user interfaces, so I haven’t been able to put it to a real test, but my initial experience has been positive. I came across two features that I find interesting. The first allows you to select one or more components, and insert a container under them. You can, for example, move existing buttons onto a panel/composite, or wedge a JScrollPane under an existing JList. The other feature I found was a tool that will convert a Swing component into an SWT equivalent. I’ve had mixed success with this feature, but it does look promising.

Jigloo is free for non-commercial use.

I’ve been working on a tutorial titled “Europa World Tour” that I’m delivering at EclipseWorld in November. This, frankly, is a huge challenge: nobody wants to sit and listen to me drone on about 21 different projects for an entire day. I believe that doing so would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

I do plan to spend some time talking about each of the projects, especially a few that I believe have the broadest appeal. That said, I see this an opportunity to expose people to projects that they might not otherwise get a chance to play with.

One of the interesting projects that I intend to spend some time with is the Eclipse Packaging Project (EPP). One of the more interesting things about this project is, at least from the perspective of Europa, that this project is not actually part of the Europa release train. This project provides a relatively small amount of code that does a relatively large (and very cool) thing: it’s what was and is used to bring the new “Eclipse IDE” packages featured on the downloads page together. The EPP code itself is not part of Europa, but the packages produced by it are front and center.

How this relates to Europa and the Europa World Tour is that this code can be used to build arbitrary packages of Eclipse code. My plan is to add a “hands-on” element to the tutorial where attendees build their own Eclipse IDE containing the Europa features they’re interested in. I haven’t gotten too much further than initial exploration into it, so I do reserve the right to change my mind if it turns out to be too hard or just inappropriate for the crowd.

This should be very interesting to organizations that want to build standardized Eclipse packages for distribution to their developers. Say you what to use some of the cool collaboration features provided by the Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) and you want to make sure that all your developers have it. Or maybe you’re building models and generating code using the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) [When’s that new version of the EMF book due out, Ed?].

EPP is still pre-release, so there’s some rough parts. But once you’ve got it set up, you’re golden. To start with, there’s no download yet for the packager; you have to get this from CVS (I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader). The the configurations that build the “Eclipse IDE” packages are there, so you can use them as a template. Basically, you have to specify one or more update sites, along with a list of features you want in your product. There’s a little bit more to it than that, but that’s where it starts. Like I said, it’s still a little on the rough side, but what’s there works.

Anyway, I think it’ll be a cool and valuable addition to the tutorial. Keep the word “addition” in mind; this will only be part of the tutorial (certainly not the main focus), which will focus mostly on defining Europa and discussing the various projects that participate in it. I hope to see you there.