Preparing the EclipseCon 2011

In two weeks, I'll be flying towards my first EclipseCon... and I would really be impatient if my current schedule wasn't so tight. As it is, I don't have time to realize it's coming so soon!

I've been working on Eclipse technologies -- rather than merely using Eclipse as an IDE -- for about three years now. Around that time, I started reading Planet Eclipse, getting to know who's who and discovering a lot about what the different projects were about. In general, this has been a very interesting read and most of all it's been a great source of ideas.

But there was one period, each year, when reading Planet Eclipse was even more interesting, but also had a bitter aftertaste, seeing pictures of this great party and not being there. Each year, the EclipseCon is the great time where people share their progress, best practices, show their creations and meet.

And this time, I'll be there to show what we've been doing. I have spent this week preparing my talk. We're doing a retrospective on an RCP application, but not just any RCP application. As I just said, I've been reading Planet Eclipse for these last 3 years, and this application was a testbed for a lot of stuff I've been reading here. I'll be honest and tell you if it was worth it, and which of these "technologies" we used made a difference ;-).

Our project is using the E4 Application Platform, released last July (yes, we started on a beta and finished on an early preview!), a way that we call "pure", that is it doesn't depend on any 3.x API that the E4 Application Platform doesn't already depend on (basically, eclipse.core, SWT and JFace); it's built from the ground up on OSGi (our non-UI bundles run on any container) and makes heavy use of Declarative Services; we've built it in an unorthodox way considering it's an RCP app, using Maven (started with Tycho and moved to maven-bundle-plugin recently); we're using Git, Hudson (or soon Jenkins) and Nexus.

Obviously, we're not going to talk about all of this. It's an extended talk but most of us already use Databinding, Declarative Services, Git, Hudson or Nexus, and there are even talks dedicated to these topics so we won't bore you with this. Instead, we'll focus on what the E4 Application Platform brings compared to RCP 3.x, on how diving into OSGi changed our ways, we'll tell you what we thought of Maven to build RCP bundles, with and without Tycho... We'll tell you why we did what we did, what went well, and how we failed. We'll reveal some horror stories and tell you how not to repeat the same mistakes we did.

This project was not just our first time doing an E4 RCP project. It was also a deep change in the way we produced software. When we prepared our talk, we tried to focus on what we thought was most interesting/unknown for the audience. My hope is that if you come hear us, you'll get some early feedback to decide what to use for your next project. We will mainly focus on E4 (and give a primer for those who had no time to check it), because that's a hot topic, but this is really a retrospective about a technological stack based on OSGi, E4 and Eclipse technologies.

In any case, I hope I'll meet many of you in Santa Clara!

I've been pretty busy...

Okay, so I've been behind my "bloggging" schedule. In fact, I've been meaning to write about the Eclipse 4 Application Platform and my proposal to improve the integration with OSGi. The discussion is still going on and it's really fascinating because we're in new territory.

It took me quite some time to feel confident enough to discuss those internals with the rest of the E4 team (some of whom have been developping Eclipse for longer than I even used it, even if I started early in 2002!). My radio silence was due to my relentless exploring of all OSGi resources I could find, including framework code (thank you freedom #1!). That included looking at Equinox, Felix, Peaberry Activation, the OSGi specifications, re-reading through and through Neil Bartlett's OSGi in Practice free book (a true gem), and more! I have been developing with OSGi for quite some time already, but going to the next level was an awesome experience.

I've been wanting to blog about the awesome BndTools as well. Don't get me wrong, I discovered OSGi through Eclipse and PDE, and I think PDE and the OSGi-aware classpath / target-platform system helped me a lot to "get" and learn to think about private packages and dependencies. But when creating many new bundles, manually managing the dependencies starts to feel like a time waste, especially when we can't do it "as well" as what a tool would do. The same goes with writing a lot of Declarative Service components, Bnd's annotations come really handy (and the DS editor in PDE suffers from some serious bugs that mess with your XML, we're now avoiding it at work).

What else? The application I develop at work will soon reach version 1.0.0. It's a custom application for a large industrial client, so what it does is off-topic here. What is more interesting is that it's built using the Eclipse 4 Application Platform as what I call a "pure" E4 application, that is it doesn't use the "Workbench Compatibility Layer" (or anything under the org.eclipse.ui package). It's only using "new API" on this side. Of course, it's built on solid and stable technology such as OSGi (a lot of it, in different ways) and SWT/JFace with DataBinding (no XWT yet). We build it with Hudson and Tycho, and we made a nice custom build because we had to work with many legacy components and some requirements on how the application should be deployed. Since I believe we are among the firsts to make a pure-E4 industrial RCP app, I have proposed an extended talk at the Eclipse Con to discuss it, and tell our experience! We'll be happy to tell you our mistakes so you can avoid doing them, and discuss how good E4 is for RCP applications in general.

Finally, I'll be giving a long talk on Scala at the Toulouse JUG this Thursday (December, 2nd). The talk will be in French, but the slides are in English. If you're around Toulouse, feel free to come but I've been told it's better if you register on the website (it's free, but it helps the organizers). I've been a Scala fan since I discovered it in 2006 (I was a functional programmer before), and even if I barely used it at work (barely is better than not at all, right?), I know it pretty well thanks to my pet projects. I'm still polishing the slides. I've already covered a lot of ground and when I think about all the stuff I decided to let aside (to keep the audience mentally sane), there's clearly a lot to say about Scala. But that's not a reason to be afraid: going back on all the languages features, I couldn't help but think how great the language is, and that I'd like to use it for daily work. I hope I will soon (what's great with OSGi is that it can make polyglot programming on the JVM transparent!).

Oh yes, since I'm a Scala fan I'm also proposing a standard talk on E4 and Scala, and what we get from mixing them.

OK, so this was pretty dense, but I promise my next posts will be more focused and detailed. Until then. ;)

This blog's recipe

Entrée

Ingredients:

• OSGi and modular JVM software
• Eclipse E4 and the Eclipse 4 Application Platform
• The marvelous world of build tools (Maven, SBT, ...)
• Functional programming languages in general and Scala in particular
• Web technologies such as XMPP, HTML5, Semantic Web, etc

Main course

Ingredients:

• Software architecture, design patterns, component-based design...
• Distributed source control and distributed development, community development
• Computer science applied to software engineering

Dessert

Ingredients:

• Free Software advocacy, rants and musings
• Random technological or pseudo philosophical talk

I hope you enjoy your meal here.

Update: Woops. I did not expect this particular post to end up on Planet Eclipse. I guess I should start with, "Hello, world. I play with Eclipse E4 and I'll be posting more soon. Stay tuned".