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Posts Tagged with “helios”

Eclipse Helios Toronto DemoCamp

Yesterday, we held the Eclipse Toronto DemoCamp at the Red Hat Canada offices.

Thirty or so people showed up and there was a lot of good presentations..

  1. Elliott Baron, Path-Sensitive Static Analysis for C/C++
  2. John Bossons, Wizards to make JPA value objects thread-safe
  3. Jason van Zyl, m2eclipse and tycho
  4. Chris Aniszczyk, Understanding and Using Git at Eclipse
  5. Ian Bull, Managing your eclipse installs
  6. Kenn Hussey, b3 Aggregator
  7. Charley Wang, C/C++ function call visualizations
  8. Andrew Overholt, Eclipse Linux Tools project

I talked about Git and demoed EGit a bit…

Afterwards, we headed to the Rose and Crown pub for drinks and food!

Overall, it was fun and thank you Eclipse Foundation for sponsoring the event!

Eclipse Helios in the News

Yesterday, Ian Skerrett posted some links about Helios in the press.

During my morning coffee ritual I read through most of them… I was especially taken with Dana Blankenhorn’s article

This was always a false image. Not that I have anything against a good parent’s basement, or a nice comfortable pair of jammies. And when open source was being born, at the bottom of the dot-bomb, there was high unemployment in the code-o-sphere.

But the coders and the coding were always professional. There have always been a lot of people in open source who knew how to make the coding train run on time.

So with Eclipse’ Helios dropping yesterday, right on schedule (even with everyone else watching the U.S.-Algeria game) it’s worth noting that this is the seventh straight year that the code has arrived on precisely the day it was supposed to.

Eclipse is the open source dog that does not bark. Its professionalism is the clue that unravels the whole case, and makes much else possible. Many things go wrong in our troubled world, but professionalism like this can get us through.

Ruff? Arf? Anyways, something to be proud of in my opinion.

Of course there was also some criticism

The big problem with any Eclipse release if finding out what it’s all about and what you have to do to start using it. As with most open source projects, the documentation is terrible and idiosyncratic. Given time on-line tutorials and third -party documentation, books, howtos,.. will start to catch up with the new release but for the beginner it’s initially an impenetrable wall.

It’s not just basic documentation that is a problem. Finding out what any given Eclipse package or project does can be next to impossible. If you don’t already know what it’s is all about then the only way to find out is to download and experiment. This isn’t helped by the fact that currently the web-based help system seems to have a bug that stops it working. The Eclipse project is often flaky on features used by beginners – it’s probably because the Eclipse developers test the cool interesting stuff and mostly ignore anything trivial.

In addition the whole approach of the Eclipse documentation is to tell you about the development process of the project, how it was started, how many milestones have been kicked over and so on. All very personally satisfying but useless for the beginner who might actually be tempted to use this free IDE.

Adding easy to follow feature descriptions and introductory explanations to the front pages of the web site would probably increase the take up of Eclipse by a factor of 10 or more. Just because it’s open sources doesn’t mean it has to lack commercial acumen.

Ok, that’s fair enough, not every project has nice documentation like Xtext or some other Eclipse projects. However, I think we’re better than most. I’m not sure how we can improve besides having some consistent guidelines projects can follow so regardless of which project you go to, the documentation is presented in a similar fashion. Any ideas?

Eclipse Helios in Action Virtual Conference

On Thursday, there will be a virtual conference demoing some of the things part of the Eclipse Helios release.

I’ll be speaking about Git tooling at Eclipse but there will be talks about JavaScript tools, Linux Tools, EclipseRT and other projects. So please sign up if you want to learn more about what is shipping with Helios and remember to tell your friends too!

Helios for Friends of Eclipse!

Since I’m a Friend of Eclipse, I was pleased to see this email today!

So if you want to grab Helios a day early, why not consider supporting Eclipse by becoming a friend! We are almost at 360 Friends for Helios too!

Let’s fill that progress bar!

Eclipse Helios Review Article at developerWorks

My article about the Eclipse Helios release finally went live today at developerWorks.

Thanks for the Eclipse.org project leads and committers out there that took the time to send screenshots and quotes. Also, while you’re at it, why not consider becoming a Friend of Helios and Eclipse to support Eclipse development!

Eclipse Helios Austin DemoCamp Recap

Last night we had an Eclipse Helios DemoCamp close to my home in sunny Austin, TX. It was nice to see some old faces and some new faces from Austin’s gaming community. Thomas Watson from IBM and the Equinox team discussed some Equinox/OSGi related things and in particular how the infamous bug 4922 got fixed (it’s not as easy of a problem as you think).

Who would have known the intricacies of getting the solution to work on a variety of platforms.

Ken Ryall from Nokia and the CDT team discussed what’s new in CDT 7.0 for Helios!

The CDT project is still going strong. We had an audience member from a gaming called BioWare (now owned by Electronic Arts) applaud the work that has gone in the CDT indexer. They use the CDT internally for some large projects (3+ million LOC) and are pretty pleased with the progress minus a few workflow issues. I was just thrilled to learn that folks within the gaming industry are using nice open source tools like Eclipse. Did I try to rope in the fellow to contribute to CDT? Of course but as we know there’s stages when it comes to engaging with an open source community, not everyone is at the same stage of the game.

Shawn Spiars talked about some of the advances in the SWT Browser Widget over the years.

I learn something new everyday… I didn’t realize all the neat Java-to-JavaScript and JavaScript-Java functionality in the SWT Browser widget API now.

Since my focus at Red Hat as of late has been Git, I ended up talking about how Git tooling is progressing at Eclipse and gave a demo of the latest EGit release.

People were very enthusiastic about having solid Git support at Eclipse.

In the end, I just want to say thanks for everyone who made it out and hope you enjoyed the beer. I look forward to the meetup of the Austin Eclipse community!

EGit and JGit 0.8.1 Released

The EGit and JGit teams are happy to announce that 0.8.1 (release review slides) has been released and submitted as part of the Eclipse Helios simultaneous release. For now, you can download it from our software repository: http://download.eclipse.org/egit/updates-0.8

Just as Helios rides the chariot of the sun to give light and heat to the world, we hope that this release provides a little light to the folks that are yearning for better Git support within Eclipse and Java.

What’s new and noteworthy?

  • EGit New and Noteworthy
    • A greatly improved user guide
    • Improved Import Repository Wizard
    • A new Git Repositories view
    • The team menu was cleaned up
    • Fast forward merge support
    • Tagging
    • 239 commits!
    • 2 new committers!
  • JGit New and Noteworthy
    • Git Porcelain APIs
    • Internationalization Support
    • Performance improvements around pack creation
    • 157 commits

So what’s next after this release? Well, we plan to release 0.9.0 in September 2010 and here are the things on the tentative plan so far…

  • Synchronize / Staging View
  • Full Merge Support
  • Full .gitignore Support
  • Rebase Support
  • Git Notes Support

Are you interested in contributing to the EGit and JGit projects?

In the end, we hope you enjoy the release and support our quest to get a 1.0 release out the door by the end of 2010.

Reminder: Austin Eclipse Helios DemoCamp Tomorrow

Here’s a reminder that there’s an Eclipse Helios DemoCamp tomorrow in beautiful Austin, TX.

There will be talks about Git, OSGi/Equinox, CDT and other Eclipse-related topics. There will be a variety of Eclipse committers and enthusiasts in attendance so if you ever wanted to track someone down to talk about Git, OSGi/Equinox or CDT this would be a good time. Also and more importantly, there will be beer from Uncle Billy’s that will help fuel the Eclipse discussion.

The speakers get to keep the growler as a benefit!

So don’t be shy, it’s not to late to sign up if you want to swing by or speak.

See you tomorrow evening at Texas Coworking!

b3 aggregator powers Helios

Yesterday, Henrik Lindberg had a great in depth blog post about the b3 aggregator. On top of what Henrik already mentioned about the b3 aggregator, most people don’t realize that it’s really one of the unsung heroes of the Eclipse simultaneous release (David Williams being one of the other heroes). As part of the Eclipse Helios release, the b3 aggregator combines repositories from various projects into a new aggregated p2 repository that everyone is familiar with when they open their Eclipse and point to: http://download.eclipse.org/releases/helios

It’s amazing enough that we are able to ship 40 or so disparate projects on time this year as part of the Eclipse Helios release but having the b3 aggregator helps make things easier. I highly recommend looking at the b3 aggregator if you’re interested in building targets or mirroring a complex set of repositories. If you want to dive a bit deeper on how the aggregator is used as part of the Eclipse Helios release, I’d recommend taking a look at the Helios build project and in particular, the helios.build file…

And to think… in a little over a month we will ship another successful simultaneous release at Eclipse! What other open source community out there can say the same? It’s really something to be proud of in my humble opinion.

Eclipse Helios IP Review Deadline

It’s that time of year again at Eclipse!

In preparation for the Eclipse Helios release, projects are asked to get their IP logs in order by February 5, 2010.