Difference between revisions of "Toast"

Revision as of 09:10, 18 September 2009

Toast is an example application meant to demonstrate a wide range of EclipseRT technologies. It operates in the telematics and fleet management domain. Telematics is the integration of telecommunications and informatics. You will have seen this in car navigation and infotainment devices. A typical telematics system interfaces to the devices in the vehicle and provides a user interface for interacting with or managing the devices. More sophisticated systems connect to a fleet management control center over a wireless network and allow remote control of the devices. For the fleet control center think of a large courier company with vehicles and packages going from place to place. This application domain is extremely rich with technology possibilities. That's why it makes such a great example!

Overview

Toast has its origins as the example application developed throughout the OSGi and Equinox book. What you see in this project is the extension of the Toast found in the book. This example takes Toast far beyond anything that could be covered in just one book and includes the use of:

Equinox 

Of course Equinox is used as the base runtime across the Toast client, server and embedded elements. The example also demonstrates a wide range of OSGi services such as HttpService, ConfigAdmin, Log, ...

Server-side 

Toast demonstrates three scenarios for the use of Equinox and OSGi on the server

p2 provisioning 

Various elements of p2 are included in Toast; building, deploying, managing profiles, ...

ECF 

Toast is a distributed application and uses ECF to do vehicle discovery, remote services and various other nifty things (Twitter?)

RAP 

The Toast control center runs on servers and presents a rich user interface using RAP including Google Map and Earth integration.

EclipseLink 

The control center needs to store and manage data about vehicles, drivers, packages, ..

EMF 

The basic Toast server side data is, of course, modeled using EMF.

BIRT 

Toast allows for reporting on the activities of the vehicles, package delivery, ... through RAP integrated reportlets.

Riena 

Riena is used to give users a rich client application experience using remote messaging and focused workflows.

Status

The Toast code has been donated to Eclipse by the authors of the OSGi and Equinox book and a number of people who participated in the development of Toast extensions for EclipseCon 2009. It is currently winding its way through the Eclipse IP process and should pop out the other end any day now. Watch Bug 289164 and CQ 3536.