First Eclipse Demo Camp in Nuremberg-Area

On June, 6th I’ll organize together with AVL DiTEST GmbH the first Eclipse DemoCamp in the Nuremberg-Area. I know that AVL is not known to many people (although it’s a very huge company) this company uses a lot of Eclipse technology. Focussing on diagnostic tools for garages and OEMs, AVL uses a model-driven approach to describe the communication of a computer system with a vehicle’s ECU (electronic control unit).

Eclipse-based technology communicating with an Audi

Therefore AVL created an internal toolchain for their product development based on the Eclipse IDE including EMF and Xtext (see pictures) and we want to demo this toolchain beginning from the textual modelling of an ECU communication until the generated OSGi bundle that communicates with the car.

XText Editor to describe communication

Join us

If you live or work in the Nuremberg-area don’t miss this event - just enter your name and company on the wiki page. We’re also looking still for presenters, so if you have something cool to show, enter your name and an abstract of the topic you want to demo.

We’re looking forward to see you.

The first Remus release as Eclipse Incubation project is approaching the final stretch. Today I want to mention a feature which is relevant for all developers that are using the Eclipse IDE.

If you use Eclipse you probably spent a lot of time with gathering information by browsing through the code, reading documentation, etc. Often you have to leave Eclipse and browse through an external system, like a Wiki, an intranet or Sharepoint.

With the Remus IDE integration you’ll be able to attach information units directly to resources in your workspace, that means to any file, folder or project. In addition Remus gives you the possibility to embed an information repository into your project  to share your attached information units with other developers. With this approach all relevant information that are required to edit the source-code you’re working on are directly linked to the piece of code. I hope you find this feature useful, if you have questions feel free to use the official communication channels to get help.

An Eclipse project with linked information units

For a detailed tutorial see the Eclipse Wiki at http://wiki.eclipse.org/Remus/IDE_Integration, there is also a screencast which shows this functionality, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xeNkAnEzEk. If you are interested, the Eclipse Foundation is hosting a webinar about the Remus project, for details, see http://live.eclipse.org/node/1005.

Remus can be downloaded via the Eclipse Marketplace, see http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/remus-information-management/.

Whats next?

In the next posting I’ll show you how to connect Remus to your Mylyn task-list to extract data and information from your issue-tracker.

Last week I wrote about using the Eclipse marketplace client for your own needs. Today I want to show you based on the RCP Mailtemplate how to integrate your own marketplace into your own RCP application.

For demo purposes I’ve installed a marketplace server here, which acts as a server endpoint and provides the required listings for the marketplace-client. This server software can be downloaded here.   (more…)

With the Eclipse 3.6 release the Eclipse Marketplace client was shipped. This interface for installing new bundles and features is much more user-friendly than the classic update-manager and provides a new way of installing additional components to your Eclipse installation, although the technical concepts didn’t change. But how can you use this nice peace of software for your needs, probably for your RCP applications, or a marketplace controlled by your own? I’ll show you. (more…)

Last week the Eclipse Foundation published the proposal for the Remus project. In the following I will show you what the goals of the project are and how simple it is to build Eclipse based applications with this technology. We highly appreciate your feedback, suggestions, discussion at the Eclipse Community forums, see http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=166

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Since today we’ve bundled in Remus a connector to the new Eclipse Marketplace platform which allows you to browse and checkout the content of Eclipse Marketplace. So you can browse through the checked out elements and use the Remus Search to find the plug-in you need. (more…)

Collecting data and information in an information management system is only half the story. An important aspect is also the ability to create visualization or printable documents based on the data in such a system, in other words, reporting. Since a few builds we’re shipping the runtime of the Reporting engine BIRT with the initial download. Since BIRT allows an easy integration of custom data sources we decided to write our own ODA driver (which is part of the Eclipse DTP Connectivity Framework) which lets you build queries that are executed against your local workspace. In the following I’ll show you how to use the integrated BIRT capabilities and two showcases how Reporting can fit into an information management system. (more…)

I must admit I’m a big fan of all EMF derivations, so also Xtext, the new framework for developing textual DSLs. Today I want to show you how to use RIM for managing your textual models, consuming the features of both frameworks, RIM and Xtext. (more…)

Yesterday I was in Ettlingen at the Eclipse Application Developer Day and listened to Benjamin Muskallas track on Singlesourcing the RCP Mail Example. He explained that it needs 2 modifications of the generated RCP application to get the example running with RAP. The first was modifying some declarative data of the bundle, which is understandable; the second change required a direct edit within the RCP Code because the ActionFactory.ABOUT workbench action is (yet) not supported by RAP. The fact of editing RCP code directly is IMHO a critical point in enabling (probably already delivered) RCP applications. I want to show a way how to avoid such modifications with an aspect orientated approach, I’ve learnt on the EclipseDemo Camp in Leipzig, 3 weeks ago, from the team of ObjectTeam. They provide an extension which is compiled with a modified Eclipse Java Compiler and enables some features for modifying call hierarchies; see the website for details. (more…)

I’m very proud to announce a new Eclipse-based OpenSource project: Remus Information Management (short “RIM”) , an application for information management. The goal of this project is to provide an open platform and tooling support for any kind of data which can be structured into a unit of information. Its features like desktop-integration, search and synchronization with remote data repositories should help the user to manage the mass of daily information-throughput and information-providers to distribute their data easily. The initial environment for RIM will be a desktop for fulfilling the requirements of desktop-integration and full offline capability but we’re already investigating to deliver RIM as a web-application.

Watch the video “RIM in 5 minutes” to get an overview of the application and its current implemented features.

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