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Eclipse 3.1.1 / site redesign

Eclipse released the 3.1.1 maintenance release today with no API changes, and over 200 bug fixes. (Nice release notes.) I have been using 3.2M1, but I think I'll drop back and get a little more stability... and compatibility with lots of plugins that are targeting the 3.1 release, many of them available through auto-update.

Also, eclipse.org has been redesigned, and your feedback is welcomed.

Check out my previous blog entry that got lost in the site update... EclipseCon 2006 adopts open and transparent call for participation.

EclipseCon 2006 Adopts Transparent Call for Participation

EclipseCon scheduled for March 20-23, 2006 has adopted an open and transparent call for participation policy.

All submissions are being handled via a modified Bugzilla system known as Eclipsezilla.

"Anyone in the community (including you) is welcome to review the submissions, ask for more information, provide comments and critiques, and even vote on which ones you'd like to see at the conference - just as anyone in (the) community is invited and encouraged to do for Eclipse bugs and features via Bugzilla."

It's going to be interesting to watch this process work.

Eclipse 3.1 Released

Eclipse 3.1 was released today

There is an updated release schedule page that now lists each Eclipse project and the anticipated release date of 3.1 compatible plugins. This information is useful and was very hard to piece together before.

The availability announced is:

Eclipse 3.1 - Now
Test and Performance Tools - Soon
Web Tools Platform - week of July 25
Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools - week of July 29
Visual Editor Project - Soon
Eclipse Modeling Framework - week of July 4
Graphical Editing Framework - Soon
UML2 - week of July 4
AspectJ 5.0 - Soon

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.

Blogging EclipseCon 2005

A couple years back, I looked at Eclipse as a Java IDE, and decided that it was not yet full-featured enough to be our main development environment. The Eclipse Project has made an incredible amount of progress in just two years.

Recently, Malcolm Davis spent a day with me demonstrating the current IDE. I showed it to some members of my team, and it was in widespread use in about a week. Some of us are using 3.0.1, and some are using 3.1M5a, and both seem to be quite stable.

I'm interested in using the IDE, adding plug-ins as well as Rich Client Platform development. In order to learn as much as I can quickly, I'm heading to EclipseCON 2005 in San Francisco, and will be blogging from there.

Check out the sessions. Several speakers have already posted PDFs of their presentations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.