Scott Schram's Blog

March 2005 Archives

Nasa Explores Eclipse Rich Client Platform

Jeff Norris and Mark Powell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory gave a fascinating presentation at EclipseCon regarding NASA's adoption of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform for Mars rover mission planning software.

Rover Operations - Each Martian morning, the rovers receive a full day of instructions. They operate autonomously all day, and transmit the resulting images and data back to earth at the end of the day. The operations staff lives on "Mars time", each day is approximately 24 hours, 40 minutes. This would have seemed great during college days, but it gets old after a while for those that have families, and on days when they're going to bed just as the sun is coming up.

Planning is done during the Martian night, and there are strict deadlines for the uplink of new rover instructions. The instructions are transmitted through JPL's deep space network to the Mars orbiter, and relayed to the rovers.

NASA's Maestro project is the mission-critical spacecraft planning tool (with visualization, simulation, timeline, plan construction) as well as a public engagement tool (students get hands-on experience with a similar interface to that used by planners.) It is also a lightweight platform for developing mission-related software, and the interface for all the Mars rovers.

The old GUI interface looked remarkably Eclipse-like with various views, such as overhead maps, lists of images, image viewers and timeline editors, so it was a natural fit with the Eclipse RCP GUI perspectives and views.

The motivations leading to Eclipse : Java for platform independence, an application framework to allow retiring large portions of their in-house code, and a component framework to allow custom deployments for different users. They went looking for an application framework, and got an IDE, too.

The Eclipse framework allows teams from various areas of NASA to contribute views that are packaged together to create a seamless GUI for the user. For example, a Plan Editor for rover operations created by NASA JPL can co-exist in the same Eclipse perspective with a graphical timeline editor created by NASA Ames Research Center, as well as several other views created by shared teams.

NASA is using a wide variety of open source and commercial products with Eclipse.

In the Eclipse RCP runtime environment, they use:

• Java Advanced Imaging, Draw2D and (planned) GEF for graphical views.
• (planned) Eclipse's BIRT for reporting. Missions generate a huge amount of data, and planning requires reports and charts.
• Log4j for logging.
• Castor XML and Xerces-J for XML handling and persistence.
• Hibernate, PostgreSQL and PostGIS for database access.
• The mission workstations run Linux, however, Windows, Mac OS-X and others are in use elsewhere, and they want to support those platforms as well.

In the Eclipse IDE environment, they use:

• JIRA, Confluence and CVS for team interaction
• XML Buddy
• JUnit and CruiseControl for testing and integration builds.

NASA has formed the Ensemble Project, an open architecture for development, integration and deployment of mission operations software and is based heavily on Eclipse RCP. It has been adopted by multiple teams from JPL for science operations, simulation and modeling and from Ames Research Center for Timeline GUIs and automated planning.

The Ensemble project is expected to be used on the 2007 Phoenix mission and the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory mission.

(Jason Fox, Ken Rabe, and I-Hsiang Shu also contributed to NASA's presentation.)

Apple Support for Eclipse

Apple Developer Connection had a booth at EclipseCon last week, and are showing signs of support for Eclipse with an article posted just in time for the conference. The article, "Developing Java Applications on Mac OS X with Eclipse" also serves as a nice introduction to Eclipse for non-Mac users.

The Apple personnel were openly stating that they are planning to hire an SWT software engineer. This new employee could enhance compatibility between SWT, the Eclipse platform, and the Mac (I've had good results with it already). A member of the Eclipse SWT team told me that Apple did not yet have a committer for the SWT project, but that they could easily get started by offering patches.

Even though Apple has their own X-Code IDE and Objective-C language, they are doing a great job of supporting developers in a wide variety of languages and tools for developing OS-X or cross-platform apps. For example, at OSCON last year, Guido van Rossum mentioned that Apple worked to make sure that the latest version of Python shipped with OS 10.3 "Panther". Apple is previewing J2SE 5.0 for the upcoming OS 10.4 "Tiger".

There were a good number of Apple laptops at EclipseCon, but corporations are still purchasing Windows laptops in bulk for their employees (and of course, IBM had a strong presence with lots of ThinkPads). From the laptops seen at last summer's OSCON, Mac has developed a huge following in the open source community.

Luis de la Rosa discusses Eclipse on Mac here with a photo of the Apple booth at EclipseCon.

Eclipse Reporting Tools Releases First Milestone

The Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) project demonstrated their first milestone release at EclipseCon today. The project released version 1.0M1 on February 28.

The initial report generation capabilities look quite interesting, with JDBC support, Eclipse-based GUI Query and Report designer, charting and instant preview.

The tutorial requires Microsoft Access, however it is possible to test the features on any JDBC database.

The team is requesting QA testing and feedback from the community.

UPDATE: The current version requires Eclipse 3.0.1, the BIRT team anticipates 3.1 support one month after 3.1 is released.

EclipseCon - Tim O'Reilly Keynote

Tim O'Reilly spoke Tuesday morning to an audience of about 900 at EclipseCon about business model patterns in the era of low-cost open source components.

He began by quoting Korzybski, "The map is not the territory", suggesting that the conventional thinking about industry business models might be in need of reframing.

In the age of commodity PC hardware, there are profitable business models on two sides, "Intel Inside" in the CPU, and Microsoft Windows in the operating system.

Many open source advocates imagined replacing the OS tier with free and open source software.

However, Tim suggests that the tiers that are evolving are:

Web applications: EBay, Google, Amazon

Commodity: Open Source Software

Infrastructure: MySQL, JBoss, Network Solutions ("Own the namespace")

The lock-in on the web applications tier is the data. The GPL has no effect because the companies do not "distribute" their software. Most importantly, the lock-in is the data provided by the users of the site. "Whoever gets the most involvement wins."

He expressed skepticism about the viability of the MySQL and JBoss dual licensing business models because they are organized around well defined interfaces, such as SQL or J2EE standards, which allow for the rise of free replacements.

Tim praised Apple's iTunes for fully integrating "software above the level of a single device" integrating the iTunes music store, iTunes application, and the iPod fully integrating the operation across all the devices. However, he observed that they have yet to get user involvement down like Amazon has.

Some of the business model patterns mentioned were:

Follow Industry Standards - Users want choice, but not too much of it.

Innovation in Assembly

Software as a Service - Amazon and Google are in perpetual beta. They "engage users as real time testers and instrument the service so you know how people use the new features."

Leverage Commodity Economics - Google considers their scaling and admin technologies more proprietary than their search algorithms.

Users Add Value - quoting Doug Carlston (founder of Broderbund), "the data the user provides is more important to them than the data we provide."

Network Effects by Default - Napster encouraged you to share anything that you downloaded by default. As opposed to trying to artificially force network effects like Friendster.

The Long Tail - From a Wired Magazine article, you can now make viable businesses off of what would not have been economical before.

Platforms and Tools - Build on Eclipse, for example.

Tim's recommended reading:

On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins

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