 EclipseCon approaches, but will OSGi steal the show?
It's now less than 10 days until the start of EclipseCon, and the preparations are drawing to a close. With almost 400 separate events listed on the full list over the 4 days, it's shaping up to be an excellent conference; there's a bunch of recommended tracks (including mine) if you're not sure what to see.
One of the great things about EclipseCon is the diversity. There's the exhibitors (as well as the open-source pavilion which was so successful last year), the tutorials as a paid-for extra, late-night Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions as well as projects and camps -- oh yeah, and the remainder of the talks on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday. But it's not just the diverse events; the Eclipse ecosystem is huge and not just JDT, so there's specific topics for reporting, AJAX, embedded development, webtools -- the list just goes on.
The only downside is that you can only be in one place at once; sometimes it's difficult to see it all! Last year, the bloggers hit the feeds such as the EclipseZone Front Page feed, which gets aggregated with other Eclipse blogs via Planet Eclipse's feed. It was actually really great to be there with other bloggers; I felt that I attended several tracks simultaneously by reading what other bloggers were writing at the time; and I'm sure that people who were unable to make it to the conference in person appreciated it, too. I'll be doing my bit again this year, so stay tuned!
Actually, I do wonder whether the most useful nugget out of this year's EclipseCon is actually the OSGi Developer Conference which is co-hosted with EclipseCon. There's a lot of interest in OSGi as an application layer -- as well as Eclipse (and the RCP derivatives) it's finding traction in distributed computing, libraries, directory services, application servers -- the list goes on and on.
The only thing holding back full adoption by the core open-source libraries in use today (e.g. Apache Jakarta Commons) is the lack of a decent OSGi build tool for Maven (which is what they predominantly use) to generate OSGi meta information in the build itself. Some of this work is being addressed by Apache Felix, which is the open-source OSGi implementation from Apache. I think once that problem gets solved, and key libraries (Jakarta commons, spring etc.) get built as bundles, then it will make deploying OSGi apps trivial. Of course, there's also BND, which can generate bundle headers using existing Jars, but it would be better to weave this information into the upstream systems -- currently, what happens is that the Jars get packaged up into a nested OSGi bundle. There is an article on Building Eclipse Plugins with Maven 2 on eclipse.org, but what's really needed is a guide for open-source developers who are building (currently) plain Java libraries.
I do also think that a standalone maven-like OSGi build tool, combining the abilities of (say) CruiseControl and Maven into a single OSGi system is inevitable. If I wasn't so busy hacking away at Pack200 or putting together some things for the provisioning proposal then I might take a stab at it myself.
If you're not sure what OSGi is, and want to know more, then Neil Bartlett has been posting an excellent introductory series to OSGi on EclipseZone, as well as a recent article on a comparison of Eclipse extensions versus OSGi services. We also put together a demo for JSig in London last week -- the presentation, code and screencasts of the demos are available at http://www.eclipsezone.com/files/jsig/ if you're interested in taking a look at them. I'd be interested to hear any feedback on the screencasts either at the EclipseZone post or alternatively mail me at the below address. For example, do the screencasts work for you, and if so, are there any other topics that you'd like covered?
So, as this newsletter draws to a close, and Eclipse 3.3M5a edges slowly out the door, I'm looking forward to this year's EclipseCon. Stop me and say "hi" if you recognise me from my new-and-improved floating head (thanks Ian!) but if not, the colourful ties will surely give the game away. And I'll also be at the Eclipse Community Awards on the Monday night to congratulate Chris the winner of the Top Ambassador Award, as well as the winners from the other finalists that we've been profiling over the last few weeks.
See you there!
Until Next Time,
Alex Blewitt
alex@eclipsezone.com
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