After GIMP‘ng Lawrence Mandel‘s face (and updating mine to the Whistler edition) for PlanetEclipse, I was reminded to call out PlanetEclipse contributers to submit a Hackergotchi compatible face, don’t be shy 🙂 (that means you Ian, I’ll shave a few years off for free :P)
A Common Build Infrastructure for Eclipse?
By Chris Aniszczyk
I want to share with everyone an important EclipseCon Short Talk which I think needs some attention. From my experience, one of the biggest hurdles an Eclipse project (or Eclipse-based product) faces is setting up a good build infrastructure. What I mean by good build infrastructure is automated builds and good reporting that leads to easy diagnosis of problems. A prime example of good build infrastructure comes from the EMF team.
Nick Boldt (EMF) has developed a system where it is really easy to kick-off and disseminate information from builds. Particularly, the EMF project has two components which make it really easy to tell what’s going on with the project. First, there is the Release Notes component which associates bug numbers with releases (through clever committing and analyzation of CVS log files). The SearchCVS component allows you to search for commits easily.
What are people’s thoughts about the talk (vote!) or even a possible BOF at EclipseCon (or even an Eclipse project proposal around this idea!). It’s my opinion that all Eclipse-based projects could benefit from a unified build infrastructure (plus, it will get my colleagues to stop throwing profanities my way about handling build with Eclipse).
Tagging in Eclipse
By Chris Aniszczyk
At Lotusphere I ran into Li-Te Cheng who gave me a cool demo of some tagging abilities in Eclipse out there. There are currently two projects out there it seems that deal with tagging in Eclipse: Eclipse Resource Tagger and TagSEA.
TagSEA is more advanced in my opinion, but after thinking a bit about this topic, wouldn’t it be cool to tag things in your code and be able to share them with co-workers (or other people)? I could imagine tagging common code (maybe like saving an EMF resource) so it could easily be found again by anyone. This begs the questions whether those crazy Mylar guys would be interested in this type of functionality.
In the end, I think a del.icio.us type thing for Eclipse or source code would benefit the community.
Nominate Something for the Eclipse Technology Awards
By Chris Aniszczyk
I was looking over the current nominations for Eclipse Technology Awards and the list is a bit thin 🙂 How about everyone pick one of their favorite applications and get in touch with the author(s) and tell them to nominate their application? I personally have contacted the authors of jUploader and uDig which are two applications I especially enjoyed using. What are your favorite applications that you would like to nominate?
Lotusphere & Eclipse
By Chris Aniszczyk
I will be facilitating a BOF at Lotusphere 2007 which will serve as a meeting of the minds between some Eclipse people (me and Mark Rogalski who is from eRCP fame), Lotus open-source people (OpenNTF) and general community members. The idea here is to get people talking to see how open-source (and Eclipse) can impact Lotus. Or what Lotus can do to better learn from the open-source community. My personal and selfish goals are to: 1) build a better bridge between the Lotus (open-source) community and the Eclipse community; 2) Try to get Lotus using a planet similar to Planet Eclipse as they have some vivacious bloggers.
My offer always stands if anyone is in the Orlando, FL area next week and wants to partake in some frosty beverages while talking open-source 🙂
GraphicsZilla & The Running Man
By Chris Aniszczyk
This post is dedicated in loving memory to the Eclipse running man (resurrect him)
Ever wonder where graphics from the various Eclipse projects come from? Who knows! My point here is that the current process isn’t as transparent as it could be. I think the Eclipse Foundation has done a great job with IPZilla and I think a similar thing could be done with graphics and user interface related tasks. Imagine something like GraphicsZilla (or UIZilla), where projects could post requests for graphics, ask for feedback on user interface related items.
For those who don’t believe this is possible, let me use the example of the Modeling Project logo contest. This simple contest with minimal advertising attracted quite a few submissions from the community, which one of them was chosen to be the logo. Not all Eclipse developers are programmers, there are fantastic designers (ie., Linda Watson, Kimberley Peter, etc…) out there that are part of the Eclipse community.
The point here is that the community is Eclipse’s greatest and most important asset and we are missing out by not taking advantage of their valuable input.
Thoughts (opened a bug)?
My EclipseCon 2007 Short Talk Picks
By Chris Aniszczyk
I spent some time recently going through some of the submitted short talks for EclipseCon. Before I list them, here is a reminder for everyone to register or propose more talks. EclipseCon really is THE Eclipse conference in my opinion. It easily is the conference with the most committers attending and has the most talks from the “trenches.”
– Getting Your Projects Website Running with Phoenix
– Building on Mylar
– Styling SWT Widgets Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
– Introducing COSMOS: A Systems Management Framework
– Pack200 compression for your plugins – how to use it, and how it works
– Providing services on top of pdebuild
– Eclipse in the Enterprise
– Versioning plug-in is good for you and the eclipse ecosystem
– Eclipse Linux Distros Project Overview
Eclipse, Equinox, OSGi
By Chris Aniszczyk
Jeff McAffer and Simon Kaegi have put out a new article on OSGi and the server side. It gives a good high level overview of everything and it’s a quick read!
Eclipse Student Project Ideas
By Chris Aniszczyk
I will be working with UCLA‘s wonderful software engineering class again this year where they emphasize student projects. The class usually entails different companies (Google, IBM, etc…) or open source projects (Wine, Eclipse, etc…) coming in and presenting an overview of the project and some project ideas that the students can mull over. This allows the students to work on cool things and learn about software engineering at the same time!
Last year, the students didn’t listen to any of my suggestions (just like in real world software engineering projects!) and decided to go with a MIPS/SPIM IDE 🙂 This year, after I give the typical Eclipse schpiel, I want to entice them with some exciting (yet doable) project ideas. For the committers out there, do you have any tasks within your projects that students could do? For others, do you have any ideas that students relatively new to Eclipse can handle?
In anticipation of this year’s Google Summer of Code, I have started a wiki page to list some student project ideas. I encourage committers and community members to post ideas there 🙂
By the way, if anyone is in the LA area on January 10th and wants to discuss Eclipse / open-source over a couple of drinks, let me know 🙂