Time to say goodbye!

I think I should start this writing from stating that this is a guest post, as I am no longer a member of IBM Eclipse Support crew.

It has been almost 5 entire years since my office was formed as a kind of joint venture between Poznan University of Technology and IBM. My main responsibility was to help customers with their Eclipse related problems. As you know, many IBM Rational products are Eclipse based, even those server-side, so I never had enough time to blog or actively participate in Eclipse development - I barely managed to open a number of bugs that could change how corporations perceived Eclipse and Eclipse-based solutions.

I'd say that my experience gathered on the border of open-source and enterprise worlds is a rather unique one. And I would like to share it with you at EclipseCon.

I guess that my 5 years of work for IBM may be summarized with the following xkcd strip - I just started realizing that careers are hard ;-).

Every age: "I'm glad I'm not the clueless person I was five years ago, but now I don't want to get any older."

If you wonder what I will do next, please stay tuned! I will announce that on my newly created blog once it gets added to the planet Eclipse (I have already opened a bug for that).

I would like to publicly say "Thank you" to Daniel Megert for his incredibly reliable work, not only in JDT - and nominate him to Eclipse Community Awards in recognition.

Thank you for reading this post :). I hope that I will have now much more time for writing.

Krzysztof (Chris) Daniel

A very interesting bug report

One image is worth more than a thousand of words.
Just check this real bug report:

New preferences for Eclipse

Hello All!
As you probably have noticed, Eclipse preferences are not perfect. A majority of enterprise companies struggle with enforcing consistent setttings across multiple installations, and so far nobody find a remedy which would be good enough.

Recently a light appeared in the tunnel. Ericcson contributed code for obtaining preferences from a certain URL, something similar to the Workspace Mechanic, which may solve some of the enterprise problems.

On the other hand, two GSoC proposals have been accepted in the area of preferences. I would like to get it done right this time, so any comments/suggestions are welcome.

New preferences for Eclipse

This is just a small update to let you know that Eclipse preferences which I have described in my last post are hosted in Eclipse labs here together with usage description.

New preferences for Eclipse

It has been long time since I recently blogged on Planet Eclipse, but as an Eclipse Support Center we have been incredibly busy during the recent year. Last time I have mentioned preferences issues that are pretty often reported and left without a fix, because of Equinox preference limitations.
We had no other choice to solve customer woes than to start a closer cooperation with Poznan University of Technology, and a group of excellent students, as a part of their thesis, analysed, designed and coded a separate preferences module, which addresses (almost) all issues in "old" preferences that we have been aware off.

Check out their webcast - it is definitely worth it (for some reason the video does not get displayed on Planet Eclipse, you have to refer to the original blog entry or directly to Youtube).

The project was started in Eclipse labs, but we would like to move it to incubator. Could any of full time commiters guide us through the process of code donation? Any help will be deeply appreciated.

The code itself requires further work, like adding proper licensing headers, project naming issues, etc. I expect the code will be ready for reviews and donations before the end of month.

Those excellent students that did that thing are:
Marek Kuzora
Anna Ferster
Filip Wisniewski (responsible for the editor)

Congratulations!

Note: Poznan University of Technology has more excellent students which would like to get experience in commercial environment (and write their thesis, too). So if you have any non-business-critical project (or research project) to realize, please drop me a line (krzysztof.daniel somewhere at pl.ibm.com), and I will contact you with appropriate person.

Eclipse preferences

As you may remember from my earlier postings, on of conditions on which you can get your degree at Poznan University of Technology is taking part in so call Software Development Studio course. Participating students learn how it is like to write a software in real project, where are deadlines, quite a big team, changing requirements, real communication problems, etc. It is the first real experience of students with business world.

Google has recently created their workspace mechanic, which addresses the most common problem that big adopters of Eclipse has - preferences management in corporate environments. I am very happy that someone has finally noticed this problem.

However, I am not happy with installing 3rd party software to manage all the preferences. More, I do not believe it is a correct way. Eclipse, as a great platform, should offer such a functionality without the need of installing non-Eclipse plugins.

That's why I am supervising the project called 'Extended Preferences'. It is at very early stage, we are not sure if it will be welcome by Eclipse Foundation, but if you have some specific requirement which you think we should implement, just let us know.

For now, we would like to satisfy following requirements:

• ability to define during the development, which preferences can be exported
• ability to define import strategy (override, merge or reset)
• ability to create a set of preferences to distribute them amongst developers
• ability to promote project preferences to workspace preferences
• support preferences which can be shared across workspaces
• help developers to use preferences correctly (implement change listeners!)
• create migration tool

We are not sure if we will succeed, the project is at very early stage, but we are going to try hard.

I will keep you informed :)

Dropins diagnosis

This post is P2 related but I could not find the appropriate words to start it. Actually I would not know what to say about P2 even if I could write this in my native language. P2 was definitely a pain at some point, but I still have no clue about the real root cause - was it P2 or just the change of general approach to plugin management.

While there are certainly areas for improvement, the P2 team does a great job in fixing bugs. They are preparing API, which in my opinion will speed up P2 adoption because you all will be able to wrap existing functionality into your UI, so there will be much more testing and much more bug reports :-).

I wanted to let you know that one, in my opinion very important, bug has been fixed:
Bug 264924 - [reconciler] No diagnosis of dropin problems.

If you add right now to your .options file following lines

org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core/debug=true
org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core/reconciler=true

P2 will inform you what bundles were found in dropins/ folder, what request was generated, and what is the plan of installation. Maybe it is not detailed explanation of what actually happened, and what went wrong, but it should give you strong information about where to start - was your bundle in the plan? Was it installation problem (P2 fault) or maybe it is just not optimal to include your feature?

This is not a lot and a lot at the same time ;-).