Graphical Skills for BugDay requested

I just marked bug 238574 for BugDay (July 25 this month) -- but it's a kind of untypical bug: It's asking for a cool Photoshopped screenshot of RSE to make our website look more sexy.

The bug has been open for a while now, and it looks like we don't have any committers with sufficient skills in image processing software to address it. So, any help from the Community is appreciated! We can offer a prominent place on the TM Website for your works.

All details, examples of what we'd like to see as well as some source material (existing screenshot) are on the bug. First come, first serve -- although we can also make a contest in case multiple proposals are attached...

BugDay is today

Once again it's the last Friday of the month, so it's Eclipse BugDay time! Come take a little time helping us committers bring down our vast backlogs of small but annoying, supposedly easy-to-fix issues.

Developers like us from the Target Management project have marked such bugs with a "bugday" keyword, prepared FAQ and Contributor Reference, and will be hanging out on IRC channel #eclipse-bugs to get in touch with you personally in case any questions come up. For more info, see the BugDay FAQ.

We still take contributions for Ganymede, want to join the Hall of Fame? See you on IRC!

PDE Goodies: Fix configuration problems

Ever thought you had some plugin installed, but couldn't find it working in Eclipse? - Here is a really nice solution that I found today:

• Window > Show View > PDE Runtime > Plug-in Registry
• Filter to show the Plug-in(s) in question
• Right-click > Show Advanced Operations
• Choose "Diagnose"

In my case, the dialog that this produced showed me that "Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment: J2SE-1.6" had not been met by my configuration. That would have taken me ages to find out!

I'm not sure since when this functionality is available (I was running 3.4RC2), but a big THANKS goes to the PDE team for this (and I assume that Chris Recoskie will be especially happy about this).

Calling All Users!

We've got a request on the DSDP PMC to help a university grad student with an open source adoption study. We need to conduct a quick survey of DSDP projects used in commercial products. Are you adopting any of the DSDP projects commercially? Please let us know with a quick E-Mail to dsdp.survey@gmail.com . Your answer will be kept confidential, only statistics will be published. Please include your commercial product's name and version, and the DSDP project(s) you are adopting.

As a reminder, there are several projects in DSDP. Here is the full list:

• Device Debugging (DD)
• Embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP)
• Mobile Tools for Java (MTJ)
• Native Application Builder (NAB)
• Real Time Software Components (RTSC)
• Target Management (TM)
• Tools for Mobile Linux (TmL)

On the Target Management project, we have another plea to our valued users and adopters: Once again we're conducting a coordinated round of testing, just in time for the upcoming Ganymede release.

The goal of this is to identify those defects that are important to YOU early enough for our 3.0 release. Of course we can prioritize defects only right if YOU find and file them in time, in YOUR specific environment! Just investing 2 hours of your precious time will be well-invested in a TM release that works right for YOU.

The trick of making this testing "coordinated" is to avoid duplication. Since everybody can see what areas others are testing, you can focus on those areas that are specific for you or that matter to you! Please go ahead, and sign up on the TM 3.0RC2 coordinated testing Wiki by editing the page. Or, to make the signup even simpler for you, just send an E-Mail to martin.oberhuber (at) windriver (dot) com to let us know what host OS, JVM version and TM/RSE components you think you could test.

Eclipse Architecture Council meeting on E4 Architectural Foundations

The Eclipse Architecture Council is holding a special 1-hour open phone meeting to discuss the Architectural Foundations of Eclipse, this Thursday May 15 at 8:00 PDT / 11:00 EDT / 15:00 UTC / 17:00 CET. The meeting is focused on preparation of the Architectural Foundations slot during the upcoming E4 Summit in Ottawa.

All interested parties are welcome to join the call, though this is a meeting for do-ers, not lurkers -- meeting notes will be posted shortly after the call for those who are more interested in the outcome than actually participating.

Please review (and edit) the agenda ahead of the meeting in order to save everybody's time.

You're welcome to join if you care for the future of Eclipse!

HyacGsocpi:

HyacGsocpi = Here's Yet another cool Google summer of code project idea - looking at the very end of the Eclipse Google Summer of Code Ideas page:

Comparing, Merging and Synchronizing directory trees of remote servers between each other or with a local replica, all over standard Eclipse APIs with replacable connection schemes. The Remote System Explorer (RSE) provides the UI framework for transparent remote system access, and while it supports comparing individual remote and local files, it does not yet have support for comparing or synchronizing whole folder hierarchies.

Eclipse Platform Team/Synchronization provides the relevant APIs, and in fact these APIs have already been used for remote synchronization in the past (for the Platform Team/Extras feature that has been retired with Eclipse 3.3). RSE is the logical successor of this much wanted feature.

It's an interesting project, bringing you in touch with Eclipse, networking as well as potentially some interesting algorithms for comparing stuff with minimal data transfer. And solving the task will make you good friend with several people just waiting for Eclipse bug 185925 getting resolved by a smart guy like you!

If you're shooting for a GSoc Project and haven't got one yet, this one might be right for you! The deadline for GSOC applications is April 7, 5:00 PM PDT /00:00 UTC April 8, 2008. The FAQ for GSOC can be found here.

Target Communication Framework (TCF)

A year ago at EclipseCon, I've been asked a lot whether there wasn't a lightweight Open Source agent for resource-constrained communications with remote systems planned or available.

And now it's here - and much more! The Target Communication Framework (TCF) is not only an extendable agent, it's a whole protocol framework that has the potential to make target communications a lot easier. TCF is a new incubating component of the Eclipse Target Management Project, and its unique benefits include

• Transport-independent multiplexing of multiple services over a single protocol
• Ability to transparently add 3rd party value-adding services in the communication chain
• Auto-discovery and single setup of all target services.

As you can see, all communication links can share the same protocol, simplifying connection setup and allowing transparent tunnelling without unnecessary protocol conversions. In fact, any 3rd party vendor can contribute a value-add server to do transport conversion from a standard TCP/IP channel into custom channels such as JTAG or even proprietary hardware connections: all services can immediately route through the new transport and take immediate benefit of the value-add.

Besides Wind River and Eclipse, the Power.org association is also actively working on TCF as a potential emerging standard. If you work in the embedded space, consider joining the effort now to discuss your unique needs!

If you want to know more, join me at EclipseCon for the TM Tutorial on Monday at 1:30, the TM Short Talk on Thursday at 11:10 or the DSDP BOF on tuesday at 7:30pm - or simply drop us an E-mail or browse the TCF online documentation.

Just one more word about E4

There's been some hot discussions around the recent announcement of "E4", a new component as part of the Eclipse Platform Project to host code and infrastructure for prototyping ideas towards planning Eclipse 4.0.

I've been both excited and surprised - like others - about this announcement. Excited because some great people finally get together doing some real work for the future of the best Open Source Platform I know. Surprised because I had expected more visibility of those efforts in earlier stages. And despite an excellent background post by Ed Merks and a plead by zx to just have things coming and contribute, there's three "Why"s that I just can't push aside:

• Why all this secrecy? Why wasn't there more ideas and discussions on the corresponding bugzilla plan item? A lot of people made suggestions there or were listening to what ideas others might have.
• Why wasn't there a call for a workshop like the provisioning workshop last year? The P2 effort seems to run excellent, why not make a similar announcement again?
  
• Why is it mostly Wind River people challenging the process? Don't the other strategic Eclipse members care about innovation and the future of Eclipse as we do, or are we just too young and passionate?

I don't want to over-analyze or over-discuss this. I'm truly thankful for the effort and energy that some of the most talented people are putting into some demos I definitely don't want to miss at EclipseCon. I can't wait to learn more about what's baking, and I'm burning to get involved into an effort that's destined to become the most innovative and powerful platform to come.

If you think that the Wind River guys are the bad guys just nagging, forgive our passion and probably misformed words. Give us a chance to get together - there's a lot of ideas and patches just waiting to get applied, and a strategy that just wants to drive innovation.