Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the eclipse category.
EclipseCon – Day 2 & 3
I love this conference so far, never saw such a lively community, the convention center is great, food is awesome :P. The rhythm is very intense, days are quite demanding but it’s a very good experience, especially being still a student; got the chance to get more focus on the industrial world.
Yesterday I was pretty much in the short talk sessions, mostly about industrial application of RCP. I gave my talk in the morning, the feedback was very good, I’m very satisfied with it.
No talks for me today, I spent the whole day making connections and talking about future works, enjoyed it very much. The poster reception was quite exciting too.
Tomorrow is the last (half) day, then long way back home.
EclipseCon – Day 1
Today EclipseCon started in Santa Clara, CA. The day was devoted to tutorials, a lot of interesting topics were discussed.
In the morning I went to the ”Building commercial-quality plugins” tutorial; I already read the book, and the talk was delivered by the authors, so I got a deeper understanding of some topics, pretty cool.
In the afternoon I went to the ”Mylyn best practices”, by Mik Kersten, and it was kinda awesome having a talk delivered by the author of the tool himself.
Anyway, so good so far, the conference is running smooth and nicely, lots of interesting topics and people. Looking forward to tomorrow’s talks…
EclipseCon 2008 approaching
I just booked my flight to the US, to attend EclipseCon. I will give a short talk about my Google Summer of Code project, and have the lucky chance to listen to a huge amount of interesting talks.
I will also take the chance to be some kind of a turist in the early days of my stay.
Updates will follow. 
SWAP 2007
It’s been a while since my last post but I’ve been quite busy, so I’ll try to catch up with the latest news .
I got back from SWAP 2007 which was held in Bari, Italy, 18-20 Dec. It was absolutely interesting, a lot of lively discussions, good insights and nice people as well.
I presented my Google Summer of Code project (ppt here) and the feedback was really good.
The full paper is available in my publications page.
Semantic-aware component provisioning: “pencils off” status report
I want to recap my summer of code so far, before the final evaluation starts. Here’s what I accomplished so far. It was a lot of work, and a huge fun as well, hope to catch your interest and get some feedback on future developments! 
GUI CONTRIBUTIONS
- new component submission view (drag and drop support from the repository explorer to add dependencies easily )
- repository explorer view
- preference page (set repository URL)
IMPLEMENTED FEATURES
- submit a new component
- usual search features (name, version, tags)
- search components providing a set of tasks
- search components providing all the tasks of the selected ones
- “smart” search of components functionally equivalent to the selected one (reasoning here)
- search components depending on the selected one
- assert functional equivalence between components
HANDS-ON
Let’s take a test drive. I submit a new component, in this case (just as an example) the “last-gsoc-demo” one. I fill in some data, and press submit. I can just drag-and-drop dependencies from the repository explorer to the dependencies viewer.
I previously submitted some sample components. Now since all jdbc drivers implement the same specification, to some extent it is correct to consider them “functionally equivalent”, and I push this statement in the knowledge base.
For sake of brevity I ask you to trust me without further shots, what I did is just assert all jdbc drivers in the repository (besides the “dummy-jdbc” one) “functionally equivalent” to the postgresql one, and then assert the “dummy- jdbc” only equivalent to “mysql-jdbc”. I can ask now the repository to give me components “functionally equivalent” to the selected one (“dummy-jdbc”), just clicking on the context menu item:
Here’s what I obtain:
You might notice that the selected item is still there, which makes sense since everything is of course functionally equivalent to itself. 
Furthermore, it is worthwhile to note I only said the “dummy-jdbc” was equivalent to “mysql-jdbc”, full stop! The rest is just the result of the reasoning process.
Now, I can also describe a component in terms of the “tasks” it carries out. Let’s suppose – just as an example – I have two components, one for “dom-parsing” and the other for “sax-parsing”.
Suppose now I was not on earth in the last years and I want to know if there exists a single component doing the two things.
I can select both of them, click on the shown item and I’ll get xerces-j actually does both things. I might decide to use it if it fits my needs, since a single dependency is better than two, in most cases.
I also could want to know if other components rely on mine, or for instance how many components actually use one, which usually means it has great reputation. Remember the “last-gsoc-demo” component? I put “mysql-jdbc” as a dependency there. I just right click on the component, and find the components depending on the selected one.
CLIENT-SERVER ARCHITECTURAL VIEW (after latest modifications)
KNOWN BUGS
- troubles with SPARQL queries involving literals: searching against id and tasks is ok, versions and tags are not (yet the http://repo.url/tag/{tag} resource works fine… i had no time to investigate further befor pencils were off)
- dangling dependencies (i.e. after a delete operation) are not handled yet.
COMING SOON (random order)
- rest (not in the soa-ish meaning)
- enable license and license-style search criteria on the plugin
- associate a new perspective with the provided views
- improve repository explorer (i don’t like that tree very much)
- bundled repository exploiting the eclipse embedded jetty server
- import existing metadata from maven POM or OSGi manifest (URL drag and drop from web browser?)
- address repository data access layer performance issues
- setup an update site somewhere on the globe
CHEERS
That’s all for now, I really enjoyed the work, and I am confident this both- side fruitful collaboration will go on. A lot of things remain to be done on this project, and I won’t let it down after Google Summer of Code stops.
I want to thank Philippe Ombredanne for mentoring me, and all the guys @ #eclipse-soc for supporting me and other students day after day. It was an invaluable experience to work with you guys.
See you online,
cheers,
Savino Sguera.
RESTlet in Eclipse Plugin Development
I am bundling the Semantic Repository for my GSoC project as an Eclipse plugin, relying on the embedded Jetty server shipped within Eclipse (yes, once it was Tomcat, used by the Help plugin).
The repository publishes a set of REST API, and makes use of the RESTlet framework, and I just discovered that guys @ Noelios provided a nice and easy way to integrate RESTlet in plugin development: have a look at FAQ#21.
Equinox and OSGi in web application development
I was really amazed reading this post by Chris Aniszczyk about moving webapp development towards OSGi bundles. A few Eclipse projects are active in that direction, and it is possible to embed Equinox (Eclipse’s OSGi implementation, which underlies Eclipse architecture itself) into a servlet container.
One of the original objectives for the server-side work was to look at what’s involved in launching and interacting with various server-side containers. Currently, there is actively maintained work in support of embedding in a servlet container.
This could really introduce a revolution in webapp development. Amazing.
PS: You might want to read more about the OSGi technology…
Mylyn, Time Tracking and Task Management
No big news in this post, yet I stumbled upon an old post @ Internet Duct Tape (thanks to this bi-monthly digest) about time tracking for programmers, and some task management tools reviews.
The post is quite interesting, but I just noticed the tools list lacks Mylyn, an Eclipse plug-in (formerly known as Mylar) I personally started using not so long ago, but which has gained popularity among developers, and which is part of the Eclipse Europa release. For those of you who already know the Mylyn project, this post is absolutely useless… skip it.
Anyway, if there is anybody out there who does not know about it … Continue reading this entry »
GSoC Midterm Evaluations
Summer of Code Midterm Evaluations are in, Leslie Hawthorn reports on Google Summer of Code Blog.
Looks like a slight decrease in successful students percentage have been experienced: 90% against last year’s 95%. Maybe some kind of relation between the higher number of accepted students and the success rate decrease could exist.
After all, it’s no surprise at all that software projects’ success rate is not even close to 90% (some numbers here… however, in most of studies I walked through success rate does not exceed 50%), so – assuming the law of large numbers applies here too – increasing the number of students (and thus projects), SoCers success rate necessarily results closer to actual rates.
That being said, glad to read my answers to the survey were close to most students’ ones . Congratulations to all SoCers who made it so far, thanks to my mentor and the whole Eclipse SoC community for the great job they did and keep doing every day … now c’mon let’s get those t-shirts (that’s what all of this is about, ain’t it? )!
Eclipse and Java for total beginners
A series of 15 videos (plus a tutorial document) has been carried out by Mark Dexter to help beginners to get into Java development using Eclipse, Wayne Beaton reports.
I had a look at the first video on YouTube, and it looks very good and usable. Other videos are available @ Sourceforge eclipsetutorial project. Have a look !
