Athena Common Builder: Thanks to the early adopters!

Here's a quick list of some of the projects @ Eclipse.org currently using Athena. If you haven't tried Athena, maybe it's time!

1. Linux Tools
2. Visual Editor (VE)
3. Voice Tools (VTP)
4. PDE Declarative Services Modeling Incubator (pde.ds.modeling.incubator)
5. Nebula Widgets Gallery
6. Faceted Project Framework (fproj)
7. EMF Query (EMF MQ)
8. EMF Validation (EMF VF)
9. EMF Transaction (EMF MT)
10. Ajax Tools Framework (ATF)

And @ JBoss.org, all available in JBoss Tools 3.1.0.M2 for Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) ...

1. JMX Console
2. BPEL Editor*
3. jBPM 3 and 4
4. FreeMarker
5. ...to name but a few.

* - will be available in M3 or you can get a nightly build here.

What are people saying about Athena?

"[I] really like the new build. It is much less confusing then the old [Common Modeling] one."

"[C]ongrats for this builder. It is quite good and I'm eager to rely fully on it."

"We are playing around with Athena and finding it really useful. It is already deployed to one of our customer developments. Thanks a lot for the hard work! We will definitely try to contribute back anything useful we will have in the process."

So, how do *you* get started? Here's a FAQ. Here's our New and Noteworthy. And here's all the rest of the knowledge base articles.

Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that there's a big list of requested features still waiting for contributions. If you use Athena, you're already half-way to contributing back. Want to help? Drop me a line any time and we can discuss what holes need filling that match your skills and most directly improve your use of PDE, p2 and Athena.

Popular Eclipse Projects

Here's what the Popular Projects box looked like on April 1, 2008. No, this isn't a very belated joke. Note that EMF is in the top slot, with MDT in 4th and 4 other projects who use or depend on at leat one Modeling project. Yay, Team Modeling.

A few months later, Modeling has captured 4th, 6th, and 7th, with 3 projects depending on them -- still 60% of the board using some Modeling! With UML2 3.0 starting up, will MDT move back up?

WTP and PDT continue to dominate in the top 3, just ahead of CDT (whose downloads get shared with Sourceforge due to the success of the Windows-only spin-off project, Wascana). By the way, PDT released a new 2.0 Integration build this week, fixing 48 bugs.

Curiously, the Visual Editor (VE) continues to live on the leaderboard, even though its last official build at Eclipse.org was over a year and a half ago. To me that says there's still a lot of community interest in this project. One of these days it'll be up and running again, under Dash's new Common Builder, and maybe get some new committers or contributors to help develop its 1.4 release. Stay tuned.

A wise man once said statistics seldom make you feel better. But they can be fun.

Visual Editor for Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede

There have been a number of questions in eclipse.newcomer lately about the availability of a visual editor for Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede.

So, I thought I'd see if VE 1.3 can be installed into Ganymede using p2 -- and in fact it's pretty easy to do.

As noted in VE Installation Guide, you can use the "Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers"... but because I usually run with the Eclipse SDK, rather than an EPP bundle, I wanted to know what the minimum requirements are for VE, so I unpacked VE into Eclipse's new dropins/ folder, and started Eclipse with the OSGi console active, using this script:

#!/bin/bash
workspace=/tmp/workspace-clean-34
pushd ~/eclipse/34clean >/dev/null
if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]; then
        rm -fr eclipse $workspace emf-unpacked
        eclipse=eclipse-SDK-3.4-linux-gtk.tar.gz
        echo "Unpack $eclipse...";
        tar xzf $eclipse
        ve=org.eclipse.visualeditor-1.3.0.200709121813
        echo "Unpack ${ve}.zip into dropins"
        unzip -q ${ve}.zip -d eclipse/dropins/ve
        mv eclipse/dropins/ve/$ve eclipse/dropins/ve/eclipse
fi

vm=/opt/sun-java2-5.0/bin/java
echo "Using vm=$vm and workspace=$workspace"; 
./eclipse/eclipse -vm $vm -data $workspace \
  -consolelog -clean -debug -console -noexit -vmargs \
  -Xms128M -Xmx256M -XX:PermSize=128M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M
popd >/dev/null

What I found was that the console listed all the missing dependencies for the VE feature, making it easy to find the features I needed to install to fully enable VE. I fired up the Help > Software Updates and installed the following from the Ganymede Update Site:

On restart, I had a working visual editor:

Building Change

Seems everyone's talking about change these days. Hell, people are even ranting about the way media is changing.

But real issues aside, in part two of this series, I'd like to briefly mention two changes happening closer to home, here in releng-land:

• EMF, SDO, and XSD are now being packaged a little differently. Consider this a little social experiment to see who, if anyone, still uses zips to get their downloads, rather than using Update Manager. Do you like the new "sourcedoc" zips? Feel free to let us know what you think (here, on IRC in #eclipse-modeling, or in the newsgroups).
• GEF is now being built by the Common Modeling Build, the first (of many, I'm sure) projects to come over to the dark side. Will DSDP or VE be next? Time will tell.