Monthly Archives: September 2007

Letters from Beijing

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
2

Here they go some of the promised pictures of my last trip to China. Now just arrived in Los Angeles from Ottawa in Los Angeles, where I got to know the back room of the US immigration for hour and a half, avoid having a common name! – or travel with a lot of time.

Right now unpacking and repacking again for Cebu for Exist Anniversary Hawaiian party, Manila, Frankfurt, the Eclipse Summit Europe in Ludwisburg where I’ll be at the Application Provisioning Symposium, Zurich and then back to Los Angeles. BTW if you want Dopplr invitations just leave a comment, pretty useful for travelers.

Tian an Men Square panoramic
Tian an Men Square panoramic

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great WallMutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Mutianyu Great Wall

Hongluo Temple

Hongluo Temple

Hongluo Temple

Equinox Summit 2007

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
2

I’m in Ottawa, at the Equinox Summit 2007, deep dive into Eclipse Equinox, the Eclipse Foundation OSGi framework.

Most interesting bits are about p2 (formerly Equinox provisioning), which basically is a way to populate a OSGi runtime from a repository (similar to a Maven repository), so after talking to Pascal Rapicault I think it’d be great if the default format of the repository were a Maven repo, that would allow using a repository manager like Maestro (or Apache Archiva).

p2 is going to use a new metadata format called Installable Units (IU) that will define the dependencies and other info about the project. It’s interesting to see how this approach aligns with Maven’s, both in the usage of a repository and externalizing the metadata out of the binary artifact (vs. OSGi usage of the manifest.mf). The reason is that the metadata needs to be gathered before the binaries to show information to the user, perform the resolution,…

An interesting point is the role that Kepler can play. Kepler is an Eclipse Foundation proposal created by DevZuz to handle collaboration metadata about projects. I’ll talk in more detail about Kepler in the future as we prepare the creation process, but you can take a look at the wiki. Kepler defines an extensible model with some core information and extensions for things like licensing, participants, build information (Maven, Ant,…), any kind of internal company info,… There’s already a Maven adaptor that will extract the information from a Maven pom, so it’d definitely make sense to have support for Equinox UIs and consider the generation of UIs from poms and viceversa through Kepler.

Another topic was Spring-OSGi by Adrian Colyer (Interface21 CTO), now called Spring Dynamic Modules for the OSGi TM platform (you gotta love trademarks), explaining how Spring easily supports exposing beans as OSGi services and consuming services using proxies to hide the OSGi dynamic nature and alleviate as possible. Right now you can take advantage using the latest 2.1 milestone (upcoming 2.5) of spring-core and spring-osgi jars. They will be increasing their OSGi support to the rest of the spring modules in the next months.

Other topics covered at the summit were tooling, how PDE is going to support these IUs, improvement of headless builds, logging,…

Using Spring from Maven (and anything else that can use a repository)

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
1

Spring is finally available through Maven repositories for final releases, milestones and snapshots, and they are adding the sources too! Ben Hale has listed the repositories that you need to have into account.

I personally would like to see the milestones in the central repository as it makes life easier for users as many other projects do.

Being responsible

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
2

From Danilo’s blog:

ÒAs soon as I put a man in command of the army, they all wanted ME
to be the general. Now it isnÕt so with Grant. He hasnÕt told me what
his plans are. I donÕt know and I donÕt want to know. I am glad to find
a man who can go ahead without me. He doesnÕt ask impossibilities of
me, and heÕs the first general IÕve had that didnÕt.Ó

Ð Abraham Lincoln, upon appointing Grant to overall command of the Union Army

That’s exactly what I look for, the kind of person that has initiative and is responsible, and can handle things by himself.

Working on an open source company, advertising your work

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
Reply

For those who don’t know already I work for DevZuz (formerly known as Mergere / Simula Labs), with the goal of Delivering Open Source Project and Process Innovation to Today’s Enterprise IT.

Leaving this self promotion behind :D, one of the advantages of working on open source is the visibility of your work. You can (and should) expose to the world what you are working on, the cool things you are doing,… Well, since few weeks ago we have a new way to do this at DevZuz.org DevZuz.org where people like Brett Porter is putting together a good amount of interesting content (and free!) about what we do.

For instance there are two interviews with Deng Ching and Emmanuel Venisse about Apache Continuum, and for those interested in globally distributed development teams you can read more experiences of our first get together in the Philippines in  Brett or Philip’s blog in addition to some of my previous postings.

And now, some photos from Philippines

Thank you for smoking

Thank you for smoking

Tarsier, Bohol

Tarsier in Bohol, seems to be typical in the southern Philippines forests.

Treoff bar

Treoff Bar, Cebu, the hotel bar where we used to hang out.

Taoist Temple, Cebu

Taoist Temple, Cebu

Mactan Island

Mactan Island

Chocolate Hills, Bohol

Chocolate Hills, Bohol. More than a thousand hills with about the same shape and size, whose origin it’s not clear. There are even legends to explain it’s formation.

Panglao, Bohol

Panglao, Bohol. Very nice beaches with palm trees, corals, white sand and clear waters.

Panglao, Bohol

Panglao, Bohol

Introducing Q4E, a new Eclipse plugin for Maven

Posted on by Carlos Sanchez
7

I’d like to introduce the Q for Eclipse (Q4E) project, an Eclipse plugin for Maven.

Features

  • running Maven goals from the IDE
  • dependency managing using the Maven POM, with automatic download of dependencies
  • dependency graphing
  • direct import of Maven 2 projects
  • wizard for creation of new projects using the archetype mechanism
  • modular approach to improve reusability by other Eclipse projects

… and more to come

FAQ

What can this Eclipse plugin do?

It will allow you to run
Maven goals from the Eclipse IDE, create new Maven projects using
archetypes, import Maven projects without any intermediate steps, view
the dependencies of your project in a graph,… we will keep adding
features with the time

How do I install it?

Refer to Installation

What are the differences between this plugin and m2eclipse (aka Tycho)?

The objective of this plugin is to be part of the Eclipse Foundation, for that reason the license is EPL and we are going to follow the foundation procedures. Thanks to the sponsorship of DevZuz, an Eclipse Strategic Developer Member we are in a good position to achieve this goal.

Besides
the objective, there are technical differences. While m2eclipse shows
Maven output in a console, Q is based in events and will show them in
an organized way that allows filtering by severity, search,…
Functionality like the dependency graph, direct import of projects or
creation of new projects using the archetype mechanism are only present
in Q.

Why the name Q?

Q, named after the special agent Q in the James Bond books and movies. No double meaning or anything like that, we are just James Bond fans 😉

Collaborating 

The project is licensed under the EPL and collaborations are welcome, please join the user mailing list to be informed of updates, or the developers list if you want to help with the development or extend the plugin.

You can also take a look at the list of known issues.