P2 - A new level of terror

No not that p2 - P2 the movie. Given the discussion about our p2, I just couldn’t resist.

I know the p2 team is working extremely hard to make p2 a killer feature. Making any change as significant as p2 will always strike fear in people, including me. However, one thing I am finding is that some people don’t appreciate what p2 buys them. Therefore, with some input from Pascal, Jeff and others, I bring you the top 10 reasons p2 is going to rock.

1. Automatic retry of download across all available sources
2. Transparently picks the best mirror
3. Bundle pooling allows sharing of plug-ins across multiple eclipse instances
4. Ability to manage the complete installation (exe, ini, etc)
5. Ability to manage and update an Eclipse instance without running it
6. Makes is easy to create headless and custom update user interfaces
7. Validates plug-in inter-dependencies so you only install plugins that work together; if you can install it runs.
8. Multi-threaded download making downloads faster
9. Only installs plugins that you need, so it reduces the number of plugins installed
10. Create uber-update sites that know how to get plug-ins from multiple sources
11. P2 means you never have to install Eclipse again, you just need to update.

Feel free to add to this list.

btw, I don’t mean to discount the concerns that have been raised. It is important that the community have these discussions and I hope they continue. Changes is always hard, especially understanding the impact it will have on everyone.

btw, thanks to mcq for the tip on the p2 movie.

Listening on Twitter

The latest shiny new toy in the social networking area seems to be twitter. If you haven’t heard of twitter, think of it as really small blog posts (140 char limit) and the ability to follow other people’s ‘tweets’.

I’ve spent the last couple of months participating in twitter. I will post some updates myself but mostly I listen/read what other people are saying. At first look, there is a lot of junk on twitter. I really don’t care that people are going to sleep or are waking up. However, what I do find very interesting is listening to what people are saying about topics that are of interest to me; things like ‘eclipse’ or ‘equinox’.

The irony, is that I don’t actually use twitter to listen, I use a search service called summize. Summize makes twitter useful for me. I can listen to what people are saying about eclipse. It has a translate option, so I can even listen to what people are saying in Japanese or German. I find this pretty cool.

So what are people saying about Eclipse? Well today some people are saying nice things about Eclipse and SVN support, someone is struggling with GMF, another person seems to be learning RCP, and other are just having problems. In general, I am just listening but I also make contacts with new people, like jeervin, who just proposed the Eclipse Monkey project.

The other way to find stuff is to follow people. Finding people to follow is not that obvious but the twubble service allows you to see who other people, that you know, are following. It is a good way to get going.

Finally, twitter is very unreliable. It goes down a lot and people like to tweet about twitter being unreliable. However, if you are into scalability stuff, twitter is looking for system engineers.

I guess you can consider me a twitter convert. It is another channel to connect with your community. It will be interesting to see how it evolves over the next 12 months. btw, if you are on twitter, don’t forget to follow me.

Eclipse Day at the Googleplex

I am excited to announce a new event called ‘Eclipse Day at the Googleplex‘ to be held June 24 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. It will be a half day event that features technical presentations on various Eclipse projects (Equinox, ATF, ECF, CDT and Mylyn) and using Eclipse to build applications for Google Android and GWT. I am also pleased that Michael Gilpin from eBay will be presenting how eBay is using Eclipse. btw, Michael has already written some articles about Eclipse at eBay. It is a great mixture of Eclipse technical content.

Mustafa Isik suggested the idea while he was a summer intern at Google last year and we have great support from people internal to Google. Special thanks to the Google Open Source Program Office for sponsoring the event and making it possible.

It is free to attend the event but you need to register on the wiki. Space is limited so please register early.

Thoughts on JavaOne 2008

Just finishing up this years edition on JavaOne. Some thoughts…

• JavaFX was definitely the main message from Sun. The Sun keynote was full of JavaFX demos showing spinning pictures. It reminded me of 1998 spinning Java logos in applets. Sun appears to want to go head to head with Adobe and Microsoft for the hearts and minds of designers and web programmers. Unlike Cote, I think they are too late and I am not sure anyone really cares about JavaFX.
• JavaOne is usually full of announcements from the major vendors, this year was the exception. In fact the Sun and Oracle keynotes were non-events; kind of boring.
• One thing that was very surprising to me is that there was little discussion about openJDK and open source Java. Last year it was all about open source Java. I know Sun is still committed to openJDK, it was just surprising the absence of discussion.
• OSGi did really well at JavaOne. Lots of people were clearly interested but most people have no idea. We still have a long way to go to educate people about Equinox and OSGi but things have started.
• The Eclipse party at the Thirsty Bear was a great success. Thanks to everyone that came.
• I also went to the eBay party. eBay is a huge Eclipse user and they are doing some neat things. btw, eBay is looking to hire some Eclipse experts. If you are interested send me an e-mail.
• Once again we gave out 750 t-shirts at the Eclipse booth. Thanks to everyone that came by the booth. It is great to hear from all the enthusiastic Eclipse users. See you next year.

New resource for Eclipse newbies

DZone has just released the first set of their Refcardz, including a ‘Getting Started with Eclipse‘. It looks like a great resource for anyone starting in Eclipse.

Nitin from Dzone was kind enough to drop off some of the Refcardz for the Eclipse booth at JavaOne; they proved to be very popular. Lets hope they do more of these for other Eclipse projects.

Organize an Eclipse Demo Camp

We are organizing another series of Eclipse Demo Camps.  Last Fall we had 30 Eclipse Demo Camps and they turned out to be great community events.

This time the demo camps are to celebrate the Ganymede release.  We already have events organized in 15 cities but I’d like to see even more.   Details on organizing a Demo Camp are here.   btw, we are having the Ottawa demo camp, on June 26 the day after the Ganymede release.  Should be lots of fun and I plan on buying Pascal lots of beer for the great p2 work.

Glassfish Running Inside Eclipse

Two weeks ago the Glassfish team announced their upcoming v3 version would be running on OSGi. Now Ludovic has a demo of Glassfish v3 running inside of Eclipse; I gather running on Equinox. Not sure about other people but this just seems so cool for many different reasons. Hopefully I will get a demo next week at JavaOne.

Redmonk Unconference

Last year at JavaOne, the highlight for me was the Redmonk Unconference.  It was a great venue to network, learn and discuss issues relevant to the open source community.  The guys at Redmonk do a great job of bringing together the technologist and the business/marketing types into one place.

I would recommend to anyone going to JavaOne to try to make it to this year’s edition.   My goal this year is to get a better appreciation of how people are using twitter for their community.  Mik Kersten is also planning to talk about task focus programming.  See you there.