So Kepler is finally going through the creation review this Wednesday and hopefully in a matter of a couple of weeks it will be setup as a proper Eclipse project with source control, issue tracking and all those goodies that will allow us to commit our code and show the world what we’ve been working on.
And some more pictures…
Greenland
Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon panorama
Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon
Brett has posted the interview where we talked about the projects I’ve been working with lately, including Kepler and Q4E, so he saved me from writing a new blog entry 😉
And finally found some time to upload more pictures from my trip to China.
Shanghai skyline
Oriental Pearl Tower
Dragon in Yuyuan Garden
Yuyuan Garden
China World Trade Center
Starbucks in Beijing
Drum and Bell towers
Beijing
Beijing
Tian’an Men Square
Tian’an Men Square
Forbidden City
Forbidden City
Forbidden City
Forbidden City
Forbidden City
After a week in Cebu and Manila preparing the launch of a new project (more details to come…) and having more fun than ever thanks to the team there and the Exist people, a 24 trip to Frankfurt via Kuala-Lumpur, and driving as-fast-as-you-can in the Autobahn, I’m finally at the Eclipse Summit Europe 2007 in Ludwisburg with Brett Porter. BTW I added to the right a Dopplr banner so you can see my future trips in case we coincide, for instance I surprisingly met Ben Alex from Acegi security (Spring-security) in Manila who I knew for 3+ years by collaborating in Acegi but never met in person, even when he traveled to Spain or the USA.
Back to Eclipse Summit, this morning was dedicated to Equinox provisioning and afternoon to Server Side Equinox, learning what’s going on in the other projects and talking about Kepler. For those interested I have posted in the Kepler wiki as example on how Kepler and P2 metadata of an Eclipse plugin look like
There are some things in the P2 Instalable Unit model that are not yet in Kepler but could easily be implemented by adding a new facet (extension points)
There’s a new release of the Eclipse plugin for Maven Q4E, with some bugfixes and minor improvements. One of the main problems we are trying to solve is the performance and memory consumption.
The Q4E team is proud to announce the release of version 0.2.2
Changes in this version includes :
Update from the update site or read the installation instructions.
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.
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,…
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.
My laptop has gone crazy, I have battery for 837 hours, I wish!
Acegi Security (Spring Security) 1.0.5 has been released, and has been completely switched over to Maven 2 (was using Maven 1 before).
Check the changelog to see what issues have been fixed.
From Danilo’s blog:
�As soon as I put a man in command of the army, they all wanted ME
to be the general. Now it isn�t so with Grant. He hasn�t told me what
his plans are. I don�t know and I don�t want to know. I am glad to find
a man who can go ahead without me. He doesn�t ask impossibilities of
me, and he�s the first general I�ve had that didn�t.�
� 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.
Carlos Sanchez's Weblog 