The Eclipse booth at JavaOne is being hosted this year (as it is normally hosted) by a broad cast of Eclipse committers, representatives from member companies, and other generally-knowledgeable people.

Yesterday, some of the folks from nexB hung out at the booth, answering questions about Equinox and being all-around great ambassadors for Eclipse. Here are the nexB folks (along with Lynn and Donald) during a lull in the excitement (it’s hard for me to take shots when there’s lots of activity at the booth, as I end up being one of the folks chatting with the visitors).

A highlight of the show for me was meeting up with Luke Li, and old friend from university (back then we knew him as Danny Li). Here’s Luke eating the fish after a great Sushi dinner.

Hanging out with the nexB guys, and then later with Doug and Shaun from EclipseLink and Virgil from BIRT is the best part of the show for me.

Today, be sure to drop by the Eclipse booth. I’ll be there from 1130 to 1330 to chat about Equinox, runtimes, and everything else you want to know about Eclipse. Mik Kersten will be there from 1330 to 1500 to talk about Mylyn, and Oliver Wolf will be there from 1500 to 1630 to talk about Swordfish. FWIW, no real swordfish were injured during our sushi-fest last night…

JavaOne is not what you might call my favourite show. This sign about sums it up for me.

How welcoming is that? It’s “Java + You”, but “Do Not Enter”. Let the lovefest begin. Did I mention the beanbag chairs?

The keynote this morning was uninspiring. With Java FX we can make lots of fancy graphics with animated flames and stuff. How cool is that? And now… Neil Young. Frankly, I what was not said speaks louder than anything that actually was said.

Mike and I did a talk today titled “The Many Moons of Eclipse”. The talk was well-received. Mike has been doing a talk like this for years. Two years ago, the audience asked for more code. Last year they asked for a demo. This year, we tried to give them both. I demoed an application that I’ve been writing running on eRCP on a Nokia E90, and RAP and RCP on Ubuntu Linux. This is the same application that I spoke about yesterday. Here’s a screenshot of the RAP version:

RAP totally rocks. I feel great pity for anybody who doesn’t know about RAP (and will be taking some steps over the next week or so to resolve that problem).

After our talk, I spent a few hours in the exhibit hall at the Eclipse booth chatting with people about various Eclipsey things. This is the shining light for me at JavaOne: interacting with people who are as excited about Eclipse technology as I am (and I’m pretty excited about it). I spoke with a couple of folks from Quest about some first-class integration they’ve done between Eclipse and JProbe. I’m looking forward to getting some trial software for review. I’ve spoken with dozens of other folks who are building their businesses based around Eclipse technology.

Mike and I walked past James Gosling and Jonathan Schwartz today. Jonathan gave Mike a curt nod. I’m sure it was very exciting for him (Jonathan that is; Mike seemed indifferent)…

We’re mixing things up a little for Eclipse Nite at JAX 2008 tonight. I turns out that the original room is just a little too close to a live band, so we’re moving across the building to room 6A.

We’ll only be in room 6A for a few minutes; we’re going to do a couple of demos and then move over to the lounge area at the back of the exhibit hall. There, things will get a lot less formal. My vision has folks arriving with laptops in tow with problems that need solving. I have a bunch of Eclipse experts planning to be there. You should be too!

I have “Eclipse Installed” stickers…

I’ve done this so many times…

Today I downloaded the Ganymede M5 release of Eclipse for RCP/Plug-in Developers and did what I always do:

1. Create a link of the eclipse executable, using the handy icon.xpm graphic, and drag the combination onto my desktop for easy launching; and
2. Open the eclipse.ini file and make the following changes:

...
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=128

Do you see it? I do this about every other time I install Eclipse (which, with all the development leading to up Ganymede is quite often). I forgot the darned “M” on the “MaxPermSize” directive. It should read:

...
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=128M

128 megabytes of MaxPermSize is much better than 128 bytes. In the words of the Best Buy robot, “Megabyte me” (that’s what he means by it, right?)

The symptoms are frustrating… You start Eclipse and it appears to be doing something just before it complete disappears.

If you’re curious about why the heck I’d do this, check out Tuning Eclipse for Performance.

Building server-based applications with Equinox is getting easier. The Equinox project’s server team has created a short tutorial that describes how to get a servlet up and running using a handful of bundles on the Equinox framework. The best part is that everything you need to run the tutorial is already included in the Ganymede M5 release of Eclipse for RCP/Plug-in Developers (previously, you had to load a bunch of prerequisite bundles). The tutorial is a little short on details, so I thought I’d take a stab at expanding on them a bit.

The first step (after downloading and installing Eclipse for RCP/Plug-in Developers) is to create a new Plug-in Project (File > New > Project > Plug-in Project). Next, navigate to the “Dependencies” page in the new plug-in’s Manifest Editor and add the org.eclipse.equinox.http.registry and javax.servlet bundles as “Required Plug-ins”. Next, navigate to the “Extensions” page and add an extension to org.eclipse.equinox.http.registry.servlets. Be sure to pick a suitable class name and alias (the alias is what you’ll use to access the servlet; e.g. for http://localhost/hello, the alias is “/hello”).

Clicking on the “class*:” label will open the “New Class” wizard:

Here, change the superclass to javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet, remove the suggested interface (javax.servlet.Servlet is implemented by javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet anyway), and click “Finish”. In the body of the resulting class, use code-completion (CTRL+1) to override the doGet method.

All that’s left is to run it. Right click on the bundle in the Package Explorer, and select “Run As > OSGi Framework”. Use a browser to navigate to your servlet; the URL will look something like “http://localhost/alias” (replace “/alias” with the alias you used when you created the extension).

The first time I ran the results of the tutorial, the server wouldn’t start. Diagnosing the problem can be a challenge if you don’t know where the log is. When you run an Equinox application, the logs end up in *.log files in the [workspace]/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.pde.core/OSGi Framework directory. You can also add the -consoleLog switch in the “Program Arguments” of your launch configuration which will cause logging information to be dumped onto the OSGi console.

It turns out that the port that the HTTP Server wanted to use, 80, was already in use. I opted to use a different port. There are several VM arguments that you can use to tune the settings of the HTTP Server, in particular
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty.http.port=8080 specifies the port on which to run. Adding this entry to my launch configuration got everything up and running on port 8080, requiring me to change the URL in my browser to “http://localhost:8080/alias”.

I’m planning to record these steps a short demo that I’ll post on Eclipse Live. I’m also planning to write this up a little better as an Eclipse Corner Article. In the meantime, comments, criticisms, and concerns are invited.

I’ve spent a few hours over the last few days reworking parts of my Eclipse Organizer example that I intend to contribute to the Eclipse Examples Project. Mostly, I’ve been working on introducing OSGi Services into the mix. Frankly, I’m totally in love with services. Yes—if I could—I’d marry them.

The Eclipse Organizer is modeled after applications like Evolution or Microsoft Outlook. FWIW, it’s intended to serve as an example of how one might go about building an application using Eclipse technology; it’s not intended to be a “real” product.

I’ve reworked the guts of the mail support to be almost entirely based on OSGi services using declarative services. I’ve got services that provide connectivity to a POP3 mail server, services that provide credential management (i.e. take care of obtaining and storing userids and passwords), services that provide repositories that hold mail, services that manage a Derby database instance, and services that let me play with all of the above through the OSGi console. It’s all very cool.

One of the things that I’ve been trying to do is to make all these services interchangeable. Everything is very loosely coupled and a service providing a bit of functionality can be very easily taken out and replaced with an alternative. I’ve also been trying to make the services as focused as possible: that is, I’ve been trying to build services do one job and defer other bits of functionality to other services. For example, the service that holds local copies of mail is separate from the service that gets mail from the server.

In the process of building this, I reminded myself of an experience I had a few years back as a services consultant. My job was to review the work done by another consulting company. The application was running on a J2EE application server and was almost completely composed of Enterprise JavaBeans. In fact, they had well over 5,000 different bean types defined. All of them session beans, most of them stateful. In their wisdom, this consulting organization had decided to make every object in their system a enterprise bean because they had some “great tools for building beans” and using them “made it easier”. The funny/sad part was that they had pretty quickly run into some limitations of the current version of the specification and made a few local “optimizations” to work around the limitations (which had a rather dramatic impact on things like data integrity and server stability).

Oh the horror.

I was reminded of this because OSGi services seem similar conceptually to stateless session beans, but far lighter-weight, more dynamic, and generally more useful.

The EclipseCon 2008 Birds of a Feather schedule is now available for your viewing pleasure.

There is still space available if you want to schedule a BoF of your own. We’re still taking them on a first-come, first-served basis so don’t wait any longer than you need to.

Be advised that I’ve been taking a careful look at the content of the abstracts. BoFs are intended to be n-way conversations among like-minded individuals; they’re not presentations, lectures, or product demonstrations. There’s been a few somewhat ambiguous abstracts that I’ve asked the submitters to revise. Also in this spirit, the rooms are not necessarily going to be outfitted with projectors and microphones. Some of the rooms may have these things, but I don’t know which ones.

Don’t forget to register for EclipseCon 2008. Do it today.

I’ve put together a very simple report on the data collected so far by the Usage Data Collector (UDC). The report itself is static, as querying the database can get quite expensive. I’ve set it up to show a fourteen day period of results. I haven’t setup an automated process for updating the report yet; until I sort out how to do that, I’ll manually update it every day or so.

The report shows command, perspective, editor, and view usage. I’ve limited the various tables to show only the top 100 entries; this seems to only be limiting for commands at this point. You can view the report here.

Things are heating up and the excitement is building with the the usage data collector (UDC). It seems that debugging is making a play…

The five most popular commands over the past 14 days are:

• org.eclipse.ui.file.save (8436)
• org.eclipse.ui.edit.delete (5289)
• org.eclipse.ui.edit.text.contentAssist.proposals (4983)
• org.eclipse.ui.edit.paste (4645)
• org.eclipse.debug.ui.commands.StepOver (4573)

I thought that it might be interesting to show some actual numbers. The value shown beside the name is the number of times the command has been invoked by all of our participants over the past 14 days. If everybody can just use “step over” a couple more times each day than paste, we can make this sucker move…

The most popular non-Eclipse project command is org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui.format.document with 97 uses over the past 14 days, and org.eclipse.wst.server.publish with 89 hits (both from Web Tools). After Web Tools, comes C/C++ Development Tools (org.eclipse.cdt.ui.edit.opendecl x 34) and Mylyn (org.eclipse.mylyn.tasks.ui.command.deactivateAllTasks x 11).