OSGi Declarative Services vs. Blueprint Services

Yesterday, I learned that OSGi Declarative Services (DS) and Blueprint Services (BS) are two different things. That was truly a D’Oh moment.

In DS, you create one component.xml file for each Service you want to share, which outlines the references to other services among other things. Overall this seems to be a nice alternative to writing bundle activators, but nothing earth shattering. On the bright side, DS is supported by Equinox for some time already, given you have the org.eclipse.equinox.ds bundle in your target platform.

Now with BS, things get more interesting. It’s basically the Spring way of doing things applied to the OSGi world. The XML configuration files of BS look very familiar when you have past experience with Spring-powered J2EE apps. You can define all the Services your bundle provides in one XML file, wire them up with other services and so on.
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RCP Product configuration best practice with Buckminster

P2 update should work now, after I have changed the product configuration to follow a standard layout that is recommended by the Buckminster folks.

RCP Product configuration best practice
The configuration is depicted in the diagram shown above. For building, we first import site.feature. This feature in turn includes the product.feature and buckminster.cspex that will contribute the create.product and create.product.zip Buckminster actions.
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1.0.0RC1 out now!

The RC1 is out now. Fetch it from SourceForge.net as usual.

So whats new? With this release, Eclipse platform has been updated to Eclipse 3.6.1 and a new ‘Check for Updates’ feature has been added that is based on Eclipse p2.

Though, the best addition is probably the Quick Filter function. Sometimes screenshots tell more than a hundred words…

The new Quick Filter menu in action

Release slippery, DocBook goodness

Howdy! It’s mid-October already, so where is the RC?? Well, shame on me there is still one documentation todo on my list: document the different dialects and their known limitations. Apart from that, I’m also waiting for some outstanding Buckminster bugfixes related to MacOS branding.

On the bright side of things, I have pimped the documentation infrastructure a bit more and enabled it to export the documentation as PDF as well. This might come in handy, because I still need to find some shape or another to post the documentation onto this website.

So, bottom line is it’s atleast another week until the RC will be ready on my end — and I just hope the Buckminster folks can deliver sometime soon.

Eclipse Helios SR1 out now!

The Eclipse folks have unleashed Helios SR1 to the masses. You can snag the bits right here.

I have also upgraded the LogSaw target platform to point to the new feature versions, and let my Hudson spill out a new build — which is looking good so far 🙂

Speaking of LogSaw, the next public release will probably be dubbed as Release Candidate and is currently scheduled for sometime early October.

Milestone 4 out now!

The often delayed M4 release of LogSaw is out now! Most notably this milestone is the first one shipping with documentation (it’s not that much yet, but it’s way better than nothing). Also, LogSaw has been migrated to Eclipse RCP 3.6, including a shiny new feature. And last but not least, some improvements have been made in the Log4J parser engine.

Snag it from SourceForge.net as usual.

Happy Birthday LogSaw

On July 23rd 2009, I committed the first check-in for this project into my closed-source Subversion repository. It has come quite along way since then, and hopefully the journey has just begun.

However, I have to apologize for not keeping up with my schedules. I didnt have enough spare time on my hands to make substantial progress. Until that changes, I will resort from throwing around with new schedules 🙂

Taskbar progress with Eclipse RCP 3.6

A few days ago Eclipse 3.6 aka Helios has been released and after playing around with it for a bit I realized that the update isn’t much of an issue. So, in trunk we are now building against Eclipse platform 3.6 and Buckminster 3.6 in case you wonder.

The only real change I did was enabling the taskbar progress feature that is present for Windows 7 and certain MacOS X versions. That’s pretty neat stuff and really simple to do too if you are working with jobs:

job.setProperty(IProgressConstants2.SHOW_IN_TASKBAR_ICON_PROPERTY, true);

Showing progress in the taskbar (Win7)