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.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
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.
Friday, March 07, 2008
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:
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.
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?
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.
Friday, October 05, 2007
TM 2.0.1: the Terminal can be too fast
In spite of all our testing, two critical regressions have been found in the TM 2.0.1 Terminal widget: Bug 205393 can cause a StackOverflowError (causing all of Eclipse to shut down), bug 205186 makes the terminal paint incorrectly on Mac OSX.
We're working on fixes with high urgency. For more info, see the Known Issues and Workarounds page on the Wiki. Enable "Watch" on it or the bugzilla's related to get informed about latest news.
For now, we need to recommend terminal users to NOT YET UPGRADE to 2.0.1 but stick with the 2.0 implementation.
We're working on fixes with high urgency. For more info, see the Known Issues and Workarounds page on the Wiki. Enable "Watch" on it or the bugzilla's related to get informed about latest news.
For now, we need to recommend terminal users to NOT YET UPGRADE to 2.0.1 but stick with the 2.0 implementation.
Friday, September 28, 2007
TM 2.0.1: Can a Terminal be too fast?
The Eclipse DSDP Target Management project just released its 2.0.1 service release with Europa SR1.
This release includes more than 150 bug fixes for seamless editing of remote files over SSH, FTP or other protocols, which many users have learned to like particularly for editing remote web servers.
What's new is that non-ASCII Encodings for file and path names in foreign languages now work properly; the Eclipse Filesystem (EFS) provider got a lot more stable, especially over FTP; and, in my opinion the pearl of this release, the Terminal got lightning fast (up to 1000 times faster on Windows, thanks to Michael Scharf's new implementation).
Can a Terminal be too fast? - When working remotely on build.eclipse.org and I'm browsing a remote file, it now scrolls so fast that I'm almost not sure whether it scrolled or not. That's a little bit strange at first, but thanks to the big buffer I can still view everything that got displayed. Awesome, Michael!
For more information, read the build notes. To grab it, just use the Download Page or get it with Update Manager from the Europa Discovery Site.
For things beyond plain remote file editing, and particularly more embedded things, the TM project made plans at its recent Face-to-face meeting in Toronto. The vision is to be the Eclipse "Explorer of the Network Neighborhood", with pluggable information providers under a single, consistent UI and a lot auto-discovery going on. Want to learn more about what's coming up? - If you happen to be at Eclipse Summit Europe just 10 days from now, drop in at my talk: The DSDP Target Management Project, Wednesday at 2:30 pm; or, join Doug Gaff's Systems Engineering for Device Software Development Symposium on Tuesday (requires registration by E-Mail with Doug).
This release includes more than 150 bug fixes for seamless editing of remote files over SSH, FTP or other protocols, which many users have learned to like particularly for editing remote web servers.
What's new is that non-ASCII Encodings for file and path names in foreign languages now work properly; the Eclipse Filesystem (EFS) provider got a lot more stable, especially over FTP; and, in my opinion the pearl of this release, the Terminal got lightning fast (up to 1000 times faster on Windows, thanks to Michael Scharf's new implementation).
Can a Terminal be too fast? - When working remotely on build.eclipse.org and I'm browsing a remote file, it now scrolls so fast that I'm almost not sure whether it scrolled or not. That's a little bit strange at first, but thanks to the big buffer I can still view everything that got displayed. Awesome, Michael!
For more information, read the build notes. To grab it, just use the Download Page or get it with Update Manager from the Europa Discovery Site.
For things beyond plain remote file editing, and particularly more embedded things, the TM project made plans at its recent Face-to-face meeting in Toronto. The vision is to be the Eclipse "Explorer of the Network Neighborhood", with pluggable information providers under a single, consistent UI and a lot auto-discovery going on. Want to learn more about what's coming up? - If you happen to be at Eclipse Summit Europe just 10 days from now, drop in at my talk: The DSDP Target Management Project, Wednesday at 2:30 pm; or, join Doug Gaff's Systems Engineering for Device Software Development Symposium on Tuesday (requires registration by E-Mail with Doug).
Monday, July 09, 2007
DSDP-TM / RSE 2.0.0.1 critical patch release
The Eclipse DSDP Target Management Project submitted a critical patch release of its Remote System Explorer (RSE) on Friday Jul 6. TM 2.0.0.1 fixes the following issues by changing 6 lines of Java code compared to TM 2.0 released with Eclipse Europa:
- bug 192741 - RSE: Moving a folder from within a ZIP Archive doesn't work if > 1 level deep: This bug is relevant when using the RSE archive handlers in order to manipulate ZIP archives on the Local or DStore hosts. The bug could lead to loss of data because moving files out of an archive would delete the files in the archive although they were not extracted properly before. This bug has been fixed.
- bug 194204 - RSE FTP: Renaming Files/Folders moves them sometimes: This bug is relevant when using RSE FTP in order to rename files on a remote FTP host. Because the current directory was not considered properly, renaming a file could move it to a different location, without checking what files are at the other location. If a file with the same name as the one being renamed already existed at the incorrect target location, that file could be overwritten without notice, leading to loss of data. This bug has been fixed.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Target Management: M6, EFS and a Webinar
The Eclipse Target Management Project just released its M6 Milestone (downloads | update site). Given that you have Eclipse 3.3M6 installed, it will also be available from the Europa Discovery Site shortly.
Top news besides lots of refactoring and API cleanup is that the RSE Eclipse Filesystem (EFS) integration has been promoted from "experimental" to "stable". It allows taking any remote file system available through RSE (like the ssh, ftp and dstore connections) and making it available as resources in the Eclipse Workspace. By sitting at the heart of the Eclipse Resource System, the full power of Eclipse - including source parsers, outline views, content assist and the like - comes to remote files as well.
Although quite a few EFS implementations have been around so far, Target Management / RSE is the first one that solves the problem of logging in to remote systems and keeping credentials in a usable UI. We'll continue working on the integration as described on plan item 170916 in order to iron out final issues and further improve performance.
EFS is a great concept of making the Eclipse Workspace more flexible, but components and plugins need to be aware that the resources they work on can now be remote as well. Work is going on through Platform Plan Item 154126, similar work items in CDT and other tools to improve their EFS integration. Up to now, however, this work has been hard tue to a lack of good EFS implementations. We hope that the new Target Management / RSE EFS implementation will help foster the adoption of EFS in the committer and plugin provider communities.
If you want to learn more about the Eclipse Target Management Project, your perfect choice of getting first-hand information about it is the upcoming Webinar hosted by the Eclipse Foundation on Thursday April 12 at 8am PDT / 11:00 am EDT / 3:00 pm UTC. In 45 minutes, you'll get an intro on the TM concepts and architecture, see an online demo, learn about upcoming plans, and get the chance to ask the TM project leads any questions you have.
Note added on 17-Apr-2007: The TM EFS Provider was fixed later in order to resolve issues running out of handles on SSH connections. These fixes were released as TM 2.0M6a. Users who already downloaded M6 can easily update out of Eclipse: Choose Help > Software Updates > Manage Configuration, find the "Remote System Explorer" feature, choose Scan for Updates.
Top news besides lots of refactoring and API cleanup is that the RSE Eclipse Filesystem (EFS) integration has been promoted from "experimental" to "stable". It allows taking any remote file system available through RSE (like the ssh, ftp and dstore connections) and making it available as resources in the Eclipse Workspace. By sitting at the heart of the Eclipse Resource System, the full power of Eclipse - including source parsers, outline views, content assist and the like - comes to remote files as well.
Although quite a few EFS implementations have been around so far, Target Management / RSE is the first one that solves the problem of logging in to remote systems and keeping credentials in a usable UI. We'll continue working on the integration as described on plan item 170916 in order to iron out final issues and further improve performance.
EFS is a great concept of making the Eclipse Workspace more flexible, but components and plugins need to be aware that the resources they work on can now be remote as well. Work is going on through Platform Plan Item 154126, similar work items in CDT and other tools to improve their EFS integration. Up to now, however, this work has been hard tue to a lack of good EFS implementations. We hope that the new Target Management / RSE EFS implementation will help foster the adoption of EFS in the committer and plugin provider communities.
If you want to learn more about the Eclipse Target Management Project, your perfect choice of getting first-hand information about it is the upcoming Webinar hosted by the Eclipse Foundation on Thursday April 12 at 8am PDT / 11:00 am EDT / 3:00 pm UTC. In 45 minutes, you'll get an intro on the TM concepts and architecture, see an online demo, learn about upcoming plans, and get the chance to ask the TM project leads any questions you have.
Note added on 17-Apr-2007: The TM EFS Provider was fixed later in order to resolve issues running out of handles on SSH connections. These fixes were released as TM 2.0M6a. Users who already downloaded M6 can easily update out of Eclipse: Choose Help > Software Updates > Manage Configuration, find the "Remote System Explorer" feature, choose Scan for Updates.
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