EclipseRT Day Austin/Session Abstracts

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Main Tent Session: Building Component Based Applications

Jeff McAffer, EclipseRT PMC Co-Lead and EclipseSource
Slides (pdf)

Introduction to Equinox and OSGi

Tom Watson, Equinox Project Co-Lead and IBM
Slides (pdf)

The OSGi specification provides a powerful modularity runtime for the Java platform, which promotes strong modularity, versioning and dynamic management of applications. The Equinox project was founded to enable the Eclipse community to exploit the benefits of OSGi technology. At its core, the Equinox team implements the OSGi Framework specification as well as several other OSGi Service Specifications such as the Event Admin, Preferences, Http, User Admin, Application Admin and others. All other components in Equinox are built upon the core OSGi technology.

In this talk we will explain the various components in the Equinox project. This includes the additional features available to OSGi developers such as the Eclipse Extension Registry, Server-Side, Provisioning, Security and others. We will demonstrate how Equinox components can be used to build OSGi applications.

Emergency Information Dissemination and Exercise Systems

Austin Riddle, Texas Center for Applied Technology & Cole Markham, Texas Center for Applied Technology
Slides (pdf)

Whether training for, or managing large-scale emergencies, collaboration is key. Information management tools that support a Common Operating Picture (COP) allow information to be effectively structured and disseminated to key players. The use of Eclipse Runtime Technologies has allowed us to develop such tools, that we are now turning into frameworks for simulation and information dashboards. RCP, RAP, GEF, Equinox and ECF have empowered us to produce systems that have been highly effective in various training and operational settings.

Come to this session to find out how:

• Over 5500 emergency response decision makers from around the country have been trained using Eclipse Technology.
• Eclipse Technology may be used in the future to prevent and manage the spread of animal disease.
• Eclipse Technology is used today in bio-surveillance efforts at the national level.
• Our coastal protection forces used Eclipse Technology in training and loved it.

And of course we will talk about lessons learned and the technical challenges in providing these capabilities.

Modular Java Applications with Spring, dm Server and OSGi

Colin Sampaleanu, SpringSource
Slides: part 1, part 2 (pdf)

OSGi offers a powerful standards-based approach to modularizing Java applications. However, working directly against a "bare" OSGi container can present its share of challenges for the average Java developer. In this session, we explore how the SpringSource dm Server can provide an enhanced environment in which to build and deploy OSGi-based applications. Topics covered include the "Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi Service Platforms" project, which is the basis of the OSGi Blueprints specification, as well as a number of features available in the dm Server environment. These features include Slices - a set of functionality aimed at modularizing web applications, plan files - which introduce comprehensive scoping capabilities and shared bundle repositories, as well as a number of other features.

The Past, Present and Future of Enterprise Software Support in OSGi

Dan Bandera, OSGi Alliance and IBM

Since its inception in 1999, the OSGi Alliance and its members have driven to expand the capabilities and scope addressed by the OSGi Service Platform. After evolving to address a number of embedded usages such as home gateways, vehicles, and mobile phones - and then become the underpinning of a world-class software development environment - the Alliance and its members have now tackled the thorny task of marrying the OSGi Service Platform to enterprise software. Come to this session to hear about how this all started, where we (the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group) are now and some possibilities of where we might be going next.

Single Sourcing Eclipse RCP and RAP

Chris Aniszczyk, EclipseSource
Slides (pdf)

The Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) provides a framework and set of tools to develop rich clients and web clients from a single code base (single sourcing), either from scratch or by migrating an existing Rich Client Platform (RCP) application. In this talk we'll explore the differences between RAP and RCP that are especially relevant to the goal of single sourcing as much code as possible. Attendees will learn about the benefits of single sourcing and get a live demo of a single sourced application.

Building Modular Applications for Embedded Devices

Brett Hackleman, Band XI
Slides (Slideshare)

It is well known within the Eclipse and OSGi development communities that OSGi is a powerful framework applicable to a wide variety of domains. Over the last 9 years it has gained significant traction for desktop applications, IDEs and more recently, server-side applications. Based on our experience using OSGi and the open source Equinox framework on over a dozen embedded systems projects, we are happy to report that these technologies are just as powerful for embedded software development.

During this talk we will discuss several of our past and current projects in the defense, heavy equipment, industrial automation and automotive domains. We will present some of the best practices for building flexible, cross-platform, high-performance embedded applications, and lessons learned along the way. We will demonstrate how the Eclipse DeviceKit framework can be used to access communication buses such as CAN, J1939 and MIL-STD-1553. And finally, we will explain how using OSGi and Equinox can simplify the development, testing and deployment of your next application, whether embedded or not.

Server-Side Equinox

Jeff McAffer, EclipseSource
Slides (pdf)

The server-side libraries in the Equinox project are now heading into their fourth year as part of the Eclipse platform. What we offer is a mature set of libraries for building OSGi web applications that in addition to being packaged with the IDE, can be found in a wide range of commercial products at IBM and other vendors. OSGi is increasingly common place in server-side environments. In the last year there's been a noticeable shift both in the Java EE and OSGi communities, where a greater focus is being placed on ensuring that the appropriate services are in place to build larger and more modular server applications.

In this talk we'll look at the Equinox server-side components and how we use them in the Eclipse platform today. In particular, we'll look at the sorts of adjustments developers must make to work effectively with the server-side APIs and also at the various deployment options there are. Both the Equinox and OSGi server communities are actively working at improving perceived gaps in the OSGi service APIs as well as ways to make server applications more dynamic and reconfigurable. We'll cover what some of these efforts are and when we hope to see them fully integrated with Equinox.

Building Composite Applications with Lotus Expeditor

Mike Masterson, IBM Lotus

As a founding member of the OSGi Alliance and initial contributor to Eclipse, IBM's ongoing mission has been to build a robust framework for modular code and reusable components. When it came time to reinvest in our Lotus portfolio, including the 20-year young Notes platform, EclipseRT was the perfect fit.

We'll look at how EclipseRT became the modular runtime of Lotus Expeditor, our unified client strategy that simplifies our architecture and fosters a rich partner ecosystem. Finally we'll explore how a template framework for building composite application greatly reduces the effort to transform existing assets into flexible components.