It is with great pleasure that I announce availability of Sapphire 0.4 release. This release includes major enhancements, such as API improvements in services and XML binding, more powerful Sapphire EL and ability to use it in more places, content proposals in text fields, split form, regular multi-section form editor page for cases where master-details presentation isn't appropriate, and much more.

Enhancements
Migration Guide
Developer Guide
Downloads

I recently gave a training course on – you guess it – RAP/RWT.
And as it seems natural for a training targeted at developers it was very code centric and had many hands-on exercises.

For hands-on exercises I find it useful to give a starting point so that tedious steps like setting up a project and the like haven’t to be done with each exercise.
For any non-trivial exercise it makes also sense to provide the final solution. In case a training participant gets lost (s)he would certainly like to compare her/his current state with the final solution of the exercises.

All this and some more offers the Eclipse Samples Manager. Jean-Michel Lemieux and Jeff McAffer developed this Eclipse plug-in in 2007 for their Eclipse RCP book. It allows you to package and deploy code samples. The tool allows users to install a starting point, step between different iterations of samples, compare them, and reset when their changes don’t work.

If you haven’t seen the Samples Manager yet, try this short video. It will give you an overview of what the tool can be used for.

I found the Samples Manager a useful tool and thought it was worth sharing. If there is enough interest, I will publish a small how-to on creating, packaging, and deploying samples with the Samples Manager in the near future.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to present at the EclipseDay at the Googleplex event which hosted around 100 eclipse enthusiasts. Shawn Pearce and I gave an update on the work going on in the EGit and JGit projects as we prepare for the 1.2 release later this month.

I’m very proud of the progress the two projects have made since we fought to have the projects move to eclipse.org and build a community there. It’s amazing to see JGit being used on Android via Agit and even have some crazy folks automagically port JGit to C# (NGit) to enable Git usage on the .NET platform. Shawn even talked about how JGit is being used within the walls of Google to power the android.googlesource.com git repositories by stuffing git objects into BigTable. Heck, there are some instances that JGit is even faster than native cgit.

In the end, it was nice to catch up with some old friends and even make some new ones this time around. A special thank you to the Google Open Source Program Office for hosting the event and providing some delicious birthday cake to commemorate ten years of the eclipse project.

Recently I received lots of requests for translating my tutorials into other languages or if my tutorials can be used in Universitity classes. In general I’m fine with that as long as the usage is non-commercial and attribution is given.

I decided to select a official licence for usage of my content so that others have better information on how they can use it. As far as I can tell the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) looks like the right licence to me.

Therefore, unless otherwise stated in the tutorials, I put the tutorials on http://www.vogella.de under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence.

Attribution for a translation or reproduction which is available on the web would be a link to the original article as well as mentioning me as the original author. This attribution should be clearly visible at the beginning of the article.

If you use the material in a non-web form an attribution should be given in the same spirit. For example if you print the material for your university class you would include a page which states the original author as well as the link to the content on the web.

Neil Barlett suggested to clarify the non-commercial part. My understanding is that this means that you cannot earn money by replicating or translating the content, e.g. via advertisements, selling books, etc.

Also a big thanks to Jovan Kostovski and Kai Toedter at Google+ for lots of consulting and tips on the licence.

I hope this help other to translate my tutorials and to spread the word about Eclipse, Android and other Java related programming around the non perfectly english speaking world.

I had the possibility to join an amazing group of people to deliver talks at EclipseDay at the Googleplex.

I have to admit it feels extremly cool getting to the google campus. Thanks to Lars Vogel accepting me as a co-speaker and the Eclipse Foundation and Google Open Source Program Office organizing the event.

I hope I get once more the possibility to show up at this amazing event and talk about Eclipse Technologies, meet old friends and make some new ones.

Here is a link to the slides.

It was my second EclipseCon Europe. And the first difference that I encountered between the two conferences was during my trip

from Grenoble to Ludwigsburg. Last year, during the flight, the Swiss airline company offered me chocolates – this year the German airline gave me a camembert sandwich. (Which would you prefer?) OK, time to talk about #ECE2011 more seriously. I can’t cover all the great things so here is just a selection.

If it was just this…

My favorite talk was the blockbuster “Collaborative Modeling: The New Deal“. Effectively, there was some great stuff that really improves collaborative modeling. It covered all the way from real-time graphical collaborative modeling with Dawn, to better handling of conflict resolution for Graphical Modeling Framework, to task focused modeling with Mylyn bridge.

Tutorial dilemma

I faced a big dilemma: to choose which tutorial to attend. I would have loved to go to the Tycho or Git tutorial, but I ultimately decided to attend the Jubula Tutorial and I have no regrets. The tutorial was really well conducted. About the product itself, my impression is that Jubula is powerful but not intuitive. I would appreciate more usable User Interface.

Modeling Symposium

This year, the Modeling Symposium was hosted as a BoFs. There was a lot of good stuff presented. I’m happy about the announcement of the GMF-Tooling revival. If you want more details on the symposium, I invite you to see Mariot Chauvin‘s blogpost.

Keynote

I was very interested in the keynote about modeling by Bran Selic. He explained his vision of modeling through eyes that have already seen a lot of material on the subject. I admit that I agree with his vision that modeling is an evolution and a more and more useful concept when going to more and more complex systems.

My talk

This talk was in the top 10 most scheduled and was quite well attended. The main objective of my talk was to show that there are Eclipse tools that are easy to use to solve performance issues. So, I’m happy that some of the attendees came to me after the talk and said that they will try to use some tools that I presented. You can find a recording of the talk here (oops they cut off the beginning). Based on feedback, I proposed a talk for EclipseCon 2012 focused specifically on the Memory Analyzer Tool. Comments and votes for it are welcome

I’m looking forward to next year’s EclipseCon Europe and also hope to attend my first EclipseCon North America next year too.

This week there were news items about browser market share, so it got me thinking about updating a blog post I did last year about the eclipse.org web stats.

For this update, I am comparing the exact same 30 day period, Sept. 20-Oct. 20, 2011 with the same days in 2010 and 2009.   For this period in 2011, eclipse.org had just over 2 million unique visitors and the most popular pages continue to be the download and home page.

1. Browser Stats  (2009 vs 2010 vs 2011)

Chrome is certainly growing and is now in solid second place passing IE.  Firefox is still the leading browser that visits eclipse.org.

Firefox: 49% vs 43% vs 39%

Chrome: 7.5% vs 21% vs 31%

IE:  31% vs 27% vs 21%

2. Operating Systems

Amazingly there is once again almost no change in operating systems visiting eclipse.org.  Similar to 2010,  Windows is 77%,  Linux 12.5% and Mac 9.6%.   I frankly find this surprising.

For mobile operating systems, Android is the most popular with a small 0.27%, iPad (0.17%) and iPhone (0.12%).

3. Languages

No surprise that English (45%) is still the dominant language setting in the browser.  China (7%) is now #2 but followed very closely by France (5%) and Germany.(4.5%)

4. Traffic Sources

Search engines continue to be the primary source of traffic, increasing to 59% in 2011 from 54% in 2010.    Google represents 93% of the search traffic, followed by baidu (3%) and bing (1.35%).   The main referring sites continue to be developer.android.com, stackoverflow.com, code.google.com, maven.apache.org, etc.

I think sharing statistics is very important for open source communities.   It is sometimes very hard to understand the changing dynamics, so I hope this helps the wider community.

Last Friday the acceptance (and unfortunately the decline) letters were sent out to people who wanted to speak at EclipseCon.  As you might expect there were lots of happy people but some people who were disappointed.   We have close to 400 submissions for 120 speaking slots and 16 tutorials, so a lot of people had their talks declined.

In the spirit of transparency, I thought it might be useful to explain the framework the program committee (PC) used to select the program.  I was not on the PC but I attended their meetings.  This year, I am also the person at the Foundation who is responsible for the overall conference and helped define the framework.

The most significant aspect that influenced the program selection were the rough targets we set for the number of talks in each track.  The targets we set were as follows:  Eclipse 4/Eclipse SDK (10 talks), EclipseRT (10), OSGi DevCon (10), Modeling/DSL (20), Mobile/Embedded (10),  Tools/Cool Stuff/Community (20) and Agile ALM Connect (40).    By far the most competitive track was the Tools and Cool Stuff track, so if your talk was in that track you had to be very good.    Agile ALM Connect is something new this year at EclipseCon, so I will elaborate below.

The reason we did the rough allocation was to ensure we have enough critical mass in key areas to attract attendees.  We want to make sure conference attendees have enough learning opportunities in some key areas to justify the expenses of attending the conference.   This is why we have focused on these tracks.

Based on the allocations, the PC worked to identify the most compelling talks across all of the submissions and then within each track.  Each PC member voted for sessions across all tracks.  The key criteria was to select the best talks.   There was some balancing needed to make sure: 1) an individual did not have more than two talks, 2) new speakers were being allowed to talk, 3) a single topic/technology was not over represented and 4) there were case studies being presented.

I think the resulting program speaks for itself:  it is an amazing line-up of speakers and topics!  Doug Schaefer and the entire PC did an amazing job!

Each year, at least one person will claim the speaking selection is due to which company is a sponsor of the conference.   This is just not true.  I am not even sure the PC knew who are the sponsors.  Some conferences do select speaking slots based on sponsorship.  We do not do that at EclipseCon and in fact we lose potential sponsors due to this policy.  We do have sponsored talks at EclipseCon but those are identified as such and selected by the sponsor not the PC.

Agile ALM Connect was handled differently from the main EclipseCon PC.  Agile ALM Connect is a new sub-conference that we are organizing at EclipseCon to attract new and a different type of attendee.   Therefore, we had a seperate program committee that included people from outside the Eclipse community.   Since this is a new conference, we also invited a number of individuals to speak since we wanted to make sure we had the right people talking.  This is why we have people from IBM, github and Atlassian talking about how they deliver software, leaders from the Puppet, Sonar, Selenium projects talking and some industry thinkers in the Agile ALM community.  The PC also selected some great sessions that is focused on Eclipse related content. Tthe results is something a returning EclipseCon attendee will find interesting but will also attract new attendees.  It truly is a unique program in the world of technology conferences.

One final point is the topic of PC feedback on the declined session proposals.  If anyone wants to have feedback on their proposal, please send an e-mail to speakers@eclipsecon.org.   There was just too many proposals to have the PC provide feedback on all of them.

One final rant, I noticed some session proposals being submitted by press relations firms.  In general, if your pr agency submitted the proposal for you, they did a bad job.  If you really want to talk at EclipseCon, my advice is you write the proposal yourself and submit it yourself.  Otherwise it comes across as boilerplate market-speak and not very compelling to the PC or the attendees.

Thank you to everyone that submitted a proposal.  The PC really did have a tough time due to the high quality of so many submissions.  I do hope you agree that result of their work is another great program for EclipseCon!

Last week, I read an article entitled, “The personal computer is dead” by Jonathan Zitttrain.

The basic premise of the article is that there’s an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers to operating system vendors on the other. If you’re a software developer, this shouldn’t be a surprise since if you have been developing mobile applications, you should have noticed the walled gardens popping up around you. To distribute applications, you have to go through a vendor like Apple and use their App Store… each individual application has to be vetted and meet a set of standards that isn’t fully transparent. Your application gets a distribution channel and Apple gets to take a cut of your profits. This model was extremely successful for Apple and has now “boomeranged back to the PC.”

There’s now an App Store for the Mac to match that of the iPhone and it carries the same restrictions essentially. I’m almost 100% sure that Microsoft will replicate this model in their next operating system. As the article states, “today’s developers are writing code with the notion not just of consumer acceptance, but also vendor acceptance.”

I theorize that these typed of wall gardens will slowly start taking advantage of what is going on in the development tooling space. With the advent and eventual maturity of online development tools (see Ace or Eclipse Orion), I envision companies forcing you to write software with tools hosted on their server and then finding a way to “tax” you for the usage. Imagine Google Chrome becoming the worlds most popular browser. Google starts integrating “apps” more prominently in their browser and the way the apps are written are fully online using their web-based tool-chain. To get an app in the browser, you have to go through some control point Google sets up.

Imagine writing software for say the blackfin processor, fully hosted on their infrastructure since that’s the way Analog Devices likes it. The company gets a new control point and potentially another revenue stream. In the end, the tools may even be more convenient for developers but what path are we heading down…?

I’m not sure if the trend is good or bad yet, but there’s definitely a shift of power from end users and software developers to vendors. I feel there’s a definitive trend in the software industry to build walled gardens. Will we start losing the power to tinker and use our own tools to do development? Will I start having nightmares that involve RMS screaming at me (while wearing some crazy costume) about free software and saying he was correct all along?

To end my diatribe, here’s a final quote from the article to mull over, “… if we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens, we’ll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we’ll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.”

Maybe I should have had more coffee this morning, thoughts?

Does TDD actually improve software quality?  Are good software developers an order of magnitude better than poor ones?  Do multiple code reviews reduce the number of bugs in the software?  Does your choice of language improve productivity? Do distributed version control systems increase the number of contributions?

Many software developers (myself included) have strong beliefs about many of these questions.  In fact, order a round of beers at EclipseCon and bring up any one of these topics and see what happens. Unfortunately, many of us base our arguments on our own experiences or anecdotes.  Occasionally we will quote some self proclaimed expert in the field and assume our argument is ‘proven’.  Is this evidence?

As tool developers — building the Best Integrated Development Environment — we need to hold ourselves to higher standards. We cannot be designing future IDEs based solely on what works well for me. If you have a few minutes, please watch the following video by Greg Wilson on Software Carpentry: Software Engineering Empirical Results. http://software-carpentry.org/4_0/softeng/ebse. I had the good fortune of meeting Greg a few years ago through the Canadian Consortium for Software Engineering. A much longer version of the talk is available (embedded below): http://vimeo.com/9270320.

Greg Wilson – What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True from CUSEC on Vimeo.

I prefer the longer one as I think he makes a much stronger point about questioning beliefs.

Presenters

If you would like to present at this event, please add your name below.

• Key Note Address :: Sri Guha.V, BOSCH - TBD
• Niranjan Babu, BOSCH - Introduction to Sphinx
• Saurav Sarkar, SAP Labs India- Collaborative modeling through CDO and Mylyn Context
• Nidhi Rajshree/Srikanth Tamilselvam, IBM Research India - Cockpit Modelling ToolKit, An Eclipse and BPMN based toolkit for Citizen centric Service Design
• Prof.Dinesha, IIIT, Bangalore - Our Experience in Introducing Eclipse in IIITB.

Eclipse Code Templates are great. Unfortunately they add lots of comments for stuff I don’t like:

public class MainTest {

    /**
     * @param args
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // TODO Auto-generated method stub

    }

}

If you also don’t like the TODO comments you can change the templates via: Window -> Preferences -> Java -> Code Style -> Code Templates.

In the code tree you have the templates. Select for example Code → Method Body and press “Edit” to edit this template and to remove the todo comment.

I hope this helps. I also added this to my Eclipse IDE tutorial in the Eclipse templates section.

You find me also on Twitter. My Google+ profile can be found Lars Vogels Profile.

Texo is an EMF variant which provides real pojo/JPA entity generation from ecore/xsd models.

The main difference with EMF is that the generated code does not contain any framework specific constructs. The code can be serialized, persisted etc. in standard frameworks (EclipseLink, Hibernate, GWT) without additional layers. This in contrast to EMF which for example requires a solution like Teneo at runtime to take care of persistence in Hibernate.

Still, eventhough Texo follows a different solution path than EMF, much of the same functionality is supported:

• XML/XMI serialization
• supports for many XSD constructs (xsd:choice for example)
• runtime model access
• safe bi-directional associations
• supports manual changes in generated code (same pattern as EMF)

Different from EMF, Texo supports this functionality by externalizing the framework specific constructs in separate generated (optional) classes. The generated entities are not ‘polluted’ with framework constructs.

In addition to the above Texo also adds new features not provided by EMF:

• generation of JPA annotated code (with manual merging)
• flexible code generation (extendable, support for list/set, etc.)
• java annotations from model to code

Texo is targeted at the server side of web server/service environments. The current development focuses on extending the Texo runtime with generated REST XML/XMI webservices.

Thanks for reading and if you are interested feel free to give feedback or ask questions on the EMFT newsgroup or forum.

gr. Martin