Showing posts with label eclipse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eclipse. Show all posts

Friday, December 09, 2011

Bndtools at the OSGi Alliance

The OSGi Alliance has been using bnd for a long time in the OSGi build. bnd is used by the ant build to create the bundles and execute the compliance tests as part of our continuous builds. It is also installed in Eclipse as an IDE plugin to provide IDE support for compilation classpath and test execution by OSGi members working in the Expert Groups.

Recently Bndtools development has been underway to create a better integration of bnd with the Eclipse IDE for bundle development. Bndtools 1.0 was just released and is available for installation into the Eclipse IDE as a replacement for bnd's Eclipse IDE support.

Since the OSGi Alliance has long used bnd, we already had the bnd infrastructure in place for our build. All that we needed to do to start using Bndtools was to update each project's .project file (using the Add Bndtools Project Nature menu item). This simple change then enabled Bndtools to manage the project within the Eclipse IDE. The OSGi Alliance will continue to use bnd in the ant build, but for our Eclipse IDE use we have moved to Bndtools.

Thanks to Neil Bartlett, Peter Kriens and the other bnd and Bndtools contributors for their hard work in making bnd and Bndtools the premier tooling for OSGi development.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Eclipse Galileo update site organization could be more useful

I saw Wayne's call for Mac users to try the Eclipse 3.5 RC1 Cocoa port. So being an Eclipse user and a Mac user, I thought I would give it a try out. I have been using 3.4 for my OSGi development work since it came out last June. I have updated to each point release and am 3.4.2 now. I started with the EPP for RCP developers since that very closely described what I needed to do. All that I needed to add to that was an svn team provider.

So I downloaded the 3.5 RC1 Cocoa driver, unzipped it and started it. But it was rather bare bones. I was missing the extra goodies from the RCP EPP download and, of course, an svn team provider. So I went to the Install New Software dialog and selected the Galileo site. But it took me quite some time to figure out what I needed to select to get back to the function I already had in my 3.4 install. It would have been much more useful to have the update organized like the EPPs. That is by the type of developer I am and the things I need to do. Then I could have found a grouping for RCP developer and installed all the things under that grouping. Since that was not there, I had to consult the 3.4 EPP pages to figure out what RCP EPP build added and then search for those things on the update site (as well as the subversive svn team providers sans svn connector :-( ).

So I think I have all the function I need installed, but it could have been much easier.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Presenting on OSGi at EclipseCon 2009

Well it looks like 2 of my session proposals were accepted by the EclipseCon 2009 program committee. So I will be doing a long talk on Symmetric Service Oriented Programming and short talk on Using BundleTracker to support the OSGi Extender Pattern. Looking forward to EclipseCon again. It is a great conference. Hope to see you there.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Another Early Draft of 4.2 from OSGi

The OSGi Alliance just announced the release of an updated Early Draft of new content for the OSGi Service Platform Release 4 Version 4.2 spec which is planned to be published in late 2Q2009.

Some of the designs in the draft are already being implemented in the Equinox 3.5 code stream. In fact, I already implemented RFC 126 Service Hooks there.

If some of my EclipseCon 2009 session proposals are accepted, I will present some of these new features there.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Equinox and Google Summer of Code

An implementation of an OSGi resolver is a complex beast. Just ask Tom Watson, the Equinox dev lead :-) The Equinox p2 project, a new provisioning system for Eclipse, also has similar and complex resolve algorithm. Recently the p2 project, changed to use the SAT4J SAT solver to drive their resolve algorithm.

We have proposed a Google Summer of Code project for someone to investigate replacing the current Equinox runtime resolver with SAT4J (or another suitable constraint solver). So if this project sounds interesting to you, please sign up for it!

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

OSGi and eRCP on Mobile Phones

Sprint (a US mobile operator) has a new OSGi based mobile phone platform called Titan. There was a session at EclipseCon announcing this. But if you missed the session at EclipseCon and want to learn more, there is a webcast on Wednesday March 26 at 1pm EDT.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Eclipse Europa on Java 1.4

Like half the rest of the programming universe, I downloaded Eclipse Europa yesterday to update my development environment with the latest and greatest released version of the Eclipse IDE. I spent a few moments figuring out what kind of developer I was given the choices offered. Since I develop OSGi code, I figured RCP/Plug-in developer was the best choice to start with. It would have been nice if OSGi bundle development was mentioned somewhere in there :-)

In any case, the "installation" (unzip is my favorite installer!) went fine. Since I deal with a few XML files, I like WST for the XML editors, etc. it provides. However, when I started Eclipse, even though WST is included in the RCP/Plug-in developer download, none of the WST stuff was functional! After some time trying to figure out what was up, I eventually figured out that it was because the default JRE on my system is 1.4! (Yes, I know it is rather retro, but I still use it as the default. I have Java 5 installed which I use when I need it.) WST just silently does not work when you start Eclipse with 1.4. No warnings or errors in the log view. I guess the WST bundles simply don't resolve because they probably require the Java 5 execution environment. Starting Eclipse with Java 5 solved the problem (and even opened the Welcome screen which I realized did not show up when I started with 1.4!).

I eventually found the Eclipse JRE page which states that the Java EE developer version requires Java 5 but I picked the RCP developer version. And while the RCP version started on 1.4, some significant function was not operational. Perhaps the website should just state that Java 5 is required for all downloads or provide some warning to the user that on Java 1.4 functions X, Y and Z don't work in Eclipse 3.3.