Osgi
OSGi Training in Dublin
Sep 7, 2010The ISA-Skillnet folks have set up a rare local opportunity for people to get some insights into the world of OSGi on Thursday this week (9th September) at the IBEC offices on Lower Baggot St. The inimitable Ian Bull, the lead for the Eclipse Zest visualization toolkit and an Equinox p2 committer will be doing the pitch. Ian knows his onions when it comes to this material and if you are looking for a solid explanation of why OSGi exists, what it does and how you can use it to structure your Java development and enforce runtime component isolation, you should get your carcass over to this talk, which is free to anyone who works for an Software Skillnet member company - list of members here (PDF link). You could get your company to join up, or just email them an ask about individual access.
Here’s the announcement: http://www.isa-skillnet.com/Training_Courses/88#ss162. The show starts at 1745.
MyEclipseCon Wednesday
Mar 24, 2010
I’m getting some good feedback on EclipseCon 2010 :) This is great news and has has buoyed up the Program Committee no end - to the point where they would almost do it again!
But we’re not there yet. There are two more days left. The rush of content and the pace of this conference seems to be way in advance of the larger affairs in the past. No-one is getting lost trying to find their target talk, people are bumping into each all over. So what’s up for tomorrow?
Exercise
Time to give up complaining about my sore foot and go for a run with the rest of the crew. Then just man up and take painkillers for the rest of the day.
Keynote
Rockets! Robots! Lasers! Space! Jeff Norris the supervisor of the Planning Software Systems Group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His group develops operations systems for a variety of space missions including the Phoenix Mars Scout, Cassini Saturn Orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers. The keynote is called Rocket Science and the Republic.
Tutorials
I love having a tutorial every morning! Today it is going to be Eclipse UI Test Automation with SWTBot, where I am going to learn how to write and run SWTBot tests, with the intention of fleshing out the Message Owl project with some tests! I’m really interested in seeing what the capabilities of this framework are (check out the Bonitasoft Blog for some hints).
Talks
First up XQDT - XQuery Getting Momentum in Eclipse to find out about the state of the art for XQuery tools here at Eclipse.
Continuing with the XML technologies theme, next on my list is Down the Rabbit Hole: A Single Character in the XML Editor, which will give me some insight into how the XML editor works. Could be useful!
Third talk will be Scale, Share and Store your Models with CDO. Back in the IONA days we made a product that had client connections to a remote EMF repository, which sat in a database. We applied changesets from clients to the data and had our own EMF->SQL persistence layer. It is a pity we didn’t have CDO back then, and I’d like to know more about it.
Developing Eclipse Plug-ins with JavaScript is next on the block. I’m interested in polyglot plugins, developing for OSGi in non-Java languages.Final talk of the day will most likely be What’s Cookin’ at SWT just to get a look at what’s going on there, especially for Cocoa.
Panels
The Future of Open Source looks interesting, so I think I’ll make that the last stop of the day.
MyEclipseCon Monday
Mar 16, 2010It's been a nervous couple of weeks here in Dublin - US passport restrictions require a six month validity period on foreign passports post arrival, and it turned out mine was due to expire in July (huh? where did that ten years go?) No more than forty-five minutes after I sent in my application, the Passport Office announced industrial action :] Fortunately, just before blood-pressure reached vein-rupturing levels this morning, I discovered that the passport is in the post and should reach me today, so it turns out I will go to the ball after all. Now I'm busy filling out my dance card.
As per usual, the diversity of sessions makes for a daunting choice -- thanks to the Program Committee, I'm going to be on my toes, running around like a blue-arsed fly from session to session. The good part about this is I'll get to (literally) bump into loads of people in the halls!
It's Monday, the first day of the conference, so everyone is hot to trot and no-one has had a drink or a row yet. Usually the most energetic day of the conference, new PBs are set on the 5k and breakfast burritos are wolfed down with aplomb. Email can go hang.
Space and Robots
First up, Mission launch for e4 rover mars challenge! Squee! In conjunction with some awesome types at NASA JPL, we have a programming competition to produce the best control software for driving a robot across a prototypical Mars terrain. Follow that link and read the FAQ for details.
Tutorials
Tutorials follow - already I've got problems about what to attend and it's not even 9am. The Xtext and p2 tutorials are the ones that jump out at me, and I think I'm going to favour the Xtext one, because it has a little bit of e4 for extra learn points.
Quick aside here. When I was working in IONA and in Progress, making Eclipse things, I had a total blackout on e4 material, basically because there was no way that we were going to re-engineer for e4 before late 2011 by my reckoning. But now that I am floating around the place, it might be a good plan to know more about this approaching technology. My experiences with Xtext (I made a not-dead-but-sleeping project charmingly titled CamelSpit) were good in the past and I would like to use it a bit more. Kim and Ian are doing the p2 gig, which made this a tough call. I'm definitely going to get their slides and exercises material if I can.
Talk Sessions
After the tutorial comes lunch and the Standard Talks. The first standard slot of the day is either going to be Dave Carver's SCRUM experiences, or the e4 model and application framework. Right now I'm tending towards Dave's presentation, provided he doesn't bring his cat, which looks a bit vicious in the photo.
Second slot after lunch - the traditional dozy need coffee slot - I think is going to be the b3 introduction. I should know more about this, but I haven't been keeping up. Bad committer! I'd like to see people's responses and questions to this session too.
Third slot after lunch - there's a choice of four standard sessions and a couple of lightning talks. I think the Eclipse Virgo one might be the one to visit at this point. I'm holding on to healthy skepticism about this project at the moment, fears of abandonware and all that, but time will tell.
As another aside, it's mildly interesting for some (although a bit of a waste from a developer's point of view) to see the choose-your-community-along-business-lines in operation: the IBM guys plus pals at Apache with Aries, the Oracle guys plus pals at Eclipse with Gemini. I'm not going to go to those talks, since I'm not involved with any of the organizations at this point (although I am an as-yet-inactive committer on Aries.) But if you want to know what is happening in the new scrabble for position on OSGi runtimes and the formation of the "enterprise" take on the picture by the usual suspects, then both of those talks will be worth a visit.
First slot after the coffee break, I think it's time to kick back and let the short concentration span rule with a couple of lightning talks - Xpand and iPhonical are my targets.
Last talk slot of the day, I'm going to find out about the brand spanky new p2 API.
Panels
Next up are the Panel Sessions and I see that Don has snuck in some contemporaneous lightning talks. Best case would have been panels on their own, but at least if you just want to see one of the talks, you can get up and move to the panel (that's where the shouting is coming from, by the way). There's a good chance I'll be moderating one of these panels, so that's what I will be up to.
Evening Antics
At this point, jetlag will be solid set in for us Euro-types, and the only way to intercede is with some ethanol-fuelled beverages and cocktail sauce-drenched shrimp at the Oracle and Sonatype receptions. Don't forget, however, that the BoFs and Unconference is happening at the same time -- sign ups are on site, and if you have any bees in your bonnet about any Eclipse related subject, or you have your own trumpet to toot on a pet project, then this is your chance to let us all know. Don't drink too much beer before you do your presentation! I'm knocking together a few talks that I'll try to present in the Unconference time - you'll see them when you get there.
The clock will be at 9pm at this stage, and it's time to unwind and think about tomorrow's sessions.
A short post on EclipseCon 2010
Nov 6, 2009[Update - once you read this, go check out this entry in Don’s blog for some extra goodies!]
The submission floodgates have been opened on EclipseCon 2010, and you have until December 18 to get your submissions in to attend the usual West Coast extravaganza of all things Eclipse and OSGi. Go for it.
I’ve been seriously quiet about the conference, even though I’m Program Chair and should be running around shouting about it. If you are following me on twitter, or searching on the #eclipsecon hashtag you will have seen a few leaking tweets over the past little while. But here, now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is a little more information. This marks the point from where you may begin the countdown to the insufferability of /me on this topic.
The Committee of The Caring
The Program Chair does get to innovate a little bit on the approach and set-up of the spirit of the conference and some of the structures that will support same. This person also gets to pick the Program Committee, a shower of dedicated and committed professionals with a overweening fondness for Eclipse and that most qualifying of characteristics – they care. I don’t mean that in a fluffy-cardigan-cuddles-and-tissues kind of way. I mean it in the way that if you try to mess with their relationship with Eclipse, they care enough to see you outside in the car park, toot sweet. You know what I’m talking about.
What’s Different This Year?
Back to the innovation piece. When Bjorn announced the conference way back in July 09, the first little peep of innovation squeaked out. This was the themes. I think it’s important that we create themes that directly address the Eclipse Ecosystem’s three constituencies - consumers, contributors and community.
- Making with Eclipse – you are consuming Eclipse open source software to build your own products, internal or external to your organization. You could even be selling them and making pots of cash, which is good. You want to come to this conference and see what people in the same boat as you are doing, what new innovations have come to light that you can use to speed up your processes and potentially reduce your costs and to show everyone how cool the stuff you’ve made happens to be.
- Making for Eclipse – you are a contributor or a committer, you write code, or docs, or both. Maybe your language skills mean you do translations. In some way you are injecting some of your expertise and time in to enhancing and extending the corpus of Eclipse creativity. You’re here to show people the awesome stuff that you are producing and adding to the Eclipse Ecosystem, as well as to teach people APIs, announce new projects and talk about project directions.
- Making Community – one of the most important things at a conference is the fact that you have many human meteors zinging around the halls bumping into each other and exchanging information. You’re here to meet your forums and IRC buddies face-to-face, or to have a full-duplex discussion with a group telling them why they should take a certain path, or to finally grab a project lead and suss out exactly how such-and-such a weird API works.
Yes, we’ve got ski ratings too. If your talk is totally hard-core, you should give it a double-diamond marking to set expectations. People with dashed expectations sometimes get a little heavy-handed with the -1 cards. Don’t worry about marking your talk as being at the easiest level, the Program Committee wants talks at all levels for all comers.
Types of Talks
Here’s where things get a bit more interesting. I made a post at EclipseCon 2009 where I blew the lid off the story that I had been at some boring talks. Yikes! I got a bit of ribbing for that, as you can imagine, so look out for the case of rotten fruit wherever I do Eclipse talks. When I got this Program Chair gig, I had a few chats with a few people, looked at a number of presentations and proposed to the Program Committee that this time around we are going to savagely cut the number of hour-long talks. This will cut waffle. It will cut meandering code walk-throughs. It will cut monster slide-decks. Your talk will be clear, sharp, to the point. You will say all you want to say and you will do it in twenty-five minutes. There will be applause at the conciseness of your perspicacity, and you will be mobbed by well-wishers in the halls. Seriously.
Here’s the nitty-gritty details of the talk sizes
- Lightning Talk – it’s a Blitz. You have twelve point five minutes to do your thing. Get up there and show that crazy mash-up you’ve constructed, tell me what’s new in your project, shoe me the result and give me a page-o-links so I can find out more. I’ll find you and bug you if I have questions.
- Standard Talk – this is the twenty-five minuter. You know the score already.
- Extended Talk – I never said there were going to be no long talks, just that we would be culling their population. An Extended Talk is fifty minutes long. You don’t just get one easy as pie. The Program Committee will be scrutinizing the submissions and you will need to get over a high bar to get an Extended Talk accepted. These guys are professionals and can smell over-stretched talk like a shark smells blood in the water. Top tips – don’t leave your abstract until the last hour before the call for submission ends and then bang it out fast; do link to a paper or document giving more information about your talk; do expand on details in the comments section of the submission; do produce slideware early; do have multiple presenters construct a connected whole from two pieces of cloth; do show some demonstration applications.
- Tutorials – you know these guys. A tutorial can be two or three hours long.
- Panels – you might know these guys from previous EclipseCons or other conferences. Panels are chancy - they can be dull, but there’s nothing better than a good, disputative panel to get people engaged. The Program Committee will be working hard to make sure the Panels won’t have a dull moment in their one hour length.
- Unconference – you’ve heard of these, right? Ever been to a BarCamp? If you haven’t, don’t worry. What we are talking about here is a participant-driven conference space in the evenings - it’s like the base class of a BoF. The idea is that you can get some space to do a short talk or meeting, you put the subject up on a notice board and people turn up, or not. We’re still putting the details together on the logistics for this one, so hang in there for a future blog entry.
I think this is the most interesting part. An EclipseCon day is a long, long day, especially if you have travelled a distance and it can be tough to keep the concentration levels up, despite liberal caffeination. The best way to stave off that all-conferenced-out feeling is to ensure that there is a mix of things going on during the day. So I’ve applied a bit of innovation to the structure of the conference itself. We kick off in the morning with either a tutorial, or a keynote followed by a tutorial. Get your learning on. After lunch, it’s talk sessions. Sit back and listen, or ask questions. End of the day, it’s Panels. Ask questions, get engaged in a conversation. Evening time, it’s the Unconference. Did something inspire you during the day? Grab a podium and talk about it! Maybe someone agrees with you, or maybe the opposite. You can go and blog the day later on.
That’s the short description of what’s going to go down this year. I’ll follow up with more detailed articles on submissions, panels, tutorials, unconference and all that. Your comments are welcome. Ask questions, write your own blog entries. While you are doing that, I’ll be over here, watching the submission system.
Insert Lightsabre Noise Here
Jun 9, 2009Just a quick announcement this time around - the guys at the FUSE Forge have just started up Project LightSabre, which is a distributed version of the OSGi EventAdmin (example) service, using Apache ActiveMQ as the event distribution mechanism. It’s been tested on Equinox and Apache Felix, but it should work on other OSGi implementations too. It’s licensed with the Apache 2.0 license
[caption id=“attachment_124” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Zoom! See the events go!”]
[/caption]
Read the Getting Started guide for more information on how to get going with this.
Update: ECF has followed on with a similar implementation at Distributed Eventadmin Service using the same technologies with a difference license. Fair play!