Gerd’s Blog

The second day of the Eclipse Summit started wit the Keynote held by David Wood a Symbian Veteran. As you might kow Symbian is getting to be pulished under The Eclipse Public License. He spoke about the power of new devices and how they will become much smarter in the future. He pointed out some issues with the different Licenses (GPL, Eclipse, ..) and that they prosue different goals.

SMILA was the second talk I attended that day. The framework is still in the incubator of the Eclipse projects. It tries to build an backed Architecture for searching. They are using JMS to divide the crawler from the indexing logic. All of the components can be changed. For indexing and converting they are using a BPEL engine tho be able to extend the functionallity easily. The project looks nice and may be we will try the framwork in the future for one of our products. At the moment there are no sources or binaries available so we will have to wait to evaluate it.

The rest of the day I attended some of the talks for a while but most of the time i used for discussions with members of the community.

The last talk I was interested in was about BIRT the well known Reporting engine in JAVA. It was nice to see some of the new features and I got some impressions how I will be able to integrat this into our current projecte where a little more than just reporting is neede.

In the end I have to say that it was really a good decision to go there even if I was not able to prepare me for the conference because of the short -term decision. Anyway I hope that I will be able to attend the EclipseCon next year.

Thanks for Rupert he posted the Link to the presentations and resources of the conference as comment in my last posting.

After the first day of the Eclipse Summit I want to make a short summarization about the first day. We came late to Ludwigsburg therefor I was not able to attend the Keynote held by Dave Thomas. I met him at JAOO 2007 and he is rally a smart guy, with a lot of experience in the computer science field.

The first session I could attend was “Aspect Weaving for OSGi”. Aspects are not new to me but the presentation gave some more impressions about the integration in OSGi. The Interesting part there is that as you might now Bundles in OSGI have their own class loader which means that they are divided from each other. For Aspects this is a big issue special if they need to be wave in the logic within runtime. At the moment we are using Aspects but weave their functionality into the classes while compile time. I have to give the bundle project a try if it will solve some issues we have at the moment with aspects (e.g. automatic building).

After that i just stayed in the room to hear the talk about “Service Discovery and Remote Services within the Eclipse Communication Framework”. What they are trying is the logic if the service is running local in an OSGi container or if it is somewhere in the cloud. Nothing of the concepts are new but they also gave some impression about their work they are doing on an other Project which is dealing with collaboration. This is more interesting for me special beaus we may need some of thees functionalities in the future in our product.

After that talk we had lunch and i start talking to some people. As some of you might know I really like talking therefor i missed the next Track :-).

At leas for me the most interesting talk was “Best Practice for Equinox and OSGi”. It was not that they where telling new stuff further more they where questioning Architecture concepts within the enviroment (e.g. Extension points). The arguments are the same as I am using when i describe while we used an Registry instead of the Eclipse Extension point concept. Most of them are dealing with testability and the possibility to not have to rely on Eclipse or OSGi at all. This is from special interest if you have an architecture where bundles or at least code of them should run on server and client. They also mentioned to use declarative services instead of the services trackers available in OSGi. I also don’t like the concept of the trackers and the static method for service resolving, but I would prefer Proxy objects generated within runtime that are hiding the service tracker from the rest of the world. I must admit that I don’t have this much information about declarative services that I can say to prefer the one against the other.

The next session that impressed me at leas a little bit was “Single Sourcing: Extend your RCP application to the Web with RAP”. What I saw at the talk was the simple mail application that was ported straight forward with RAP to a web application. Of course they had to do some shortcuts and not everything is working, but i will give it a try to get an impression. Maybe we can use this in the near future.

The last session was “EclipseLink: High Performance Java Persistence”. I just got a view hints about the API but nothing really new to me.

I have to say that the people within the Eclipse community (I am the first time at an Eclipse Conference) is are smart and have good ideas. The issue with all the JAVA environment is just that the community is slowing down in the bigger project and hundreds of small new projects are started to compensate this. There is one big issue in this whole Ecosystem; to find the correct concepts, bundels, plugins for your need. If you are not attending Conferences like this one you will get lost in the amount of projects available for this environment.