Everything prepared for Galileo

Last night I fixed the last bug for Eclipse Galileo. Just in time! Today the release candidate RC5 is built for version 0.6 of our project Java Workflow Tooling (JWT) and this release candidate will be used in the final Eclipse Galileo build. You'll find JWT on the Galileo update server in the area General Purpose Tools.

But this doesn't mean that we'll now have time to rest and lie in the sun. Now is the time to summarize the development in JWT of the last months in a few sentences for articles and blogs. It's also the time to plan ahead: how shall the project plan for the next years look like? Which releases will we have and how will the general strategy for e4 as well as beyond look like?


In addition to that there are also integrators of JWT that need to be updated with the new version. In our SourceForge project AgilPro we have a toolsuite that allows to model, simulate and execute workflows. It includes all the plugins (e.g. workflow editor but also several transformations) from the JWT Galileo release.

In addition it also contains the Workflow codegeneration framework which allows us to transform the graph-based to a block-based structure in order to generate BPEL-code (1). So we are just updating and adapting everything until next week in order to have hopefully a joint release of Galileo and AgilPro.

(1) I know that BPEL is not only a block-based language, but can also be used graph-based. But the block-based structure is much better to read and maintain in BPEL-editors.

Article about JWT in Eclipse magazine

If you are interested in process modeling or workflow execution, you might want to have a look in the newest German-speaking Eclipse magazine ("eclipse Magazin"). In their current issue there is an article called "Geschäftsprozesse ausführen mit Eclipse JWT". It reports about the latest progress of the Eclipse Technology project Java Workflow Tooling (JWT).

If you want to learn more about this project, please don't hesitate to contact the mailing list or the newsgroups.

JWT and Galileo M7

Yesterday our milestone M7 for the Galileo release of the Java Workflow Tooling (JWT) project has been finalized and published. As we are part of the yearly release train we are bound to the deadlines of Galileo. Please find the milestone build either on our JWT stable update site or on the Galileo staging repository.
JWT allows you to model your workflows (e.g. starting with the STP BPMN editor), to generate code in XPDL, jPDL or other languages out of your model and deploy that code to a workflow engine. Thereby, the workflow editor provides you with different views on your process (different icons, figures, names, etc.).

We built and tested JWT against Galileo M7, EMF 2.5 and ATL3.0 as well as with Ganymede, EMF 2.4 and ATL2. At the beginning we were facing some problems with ATL3, but thanks to our committers from Obeo and OpenWide, these problems have been resolved.

The M7 was the freeze date for our release, so we won't make any more changes on the features, UI or API any more, but will still work on some bugs that we are currently aware of. Please feel free to try the newest release and give us some feedback or report any issues, enhancement request or feature request on Bugzilla.

If you are new to JWT, but would like to know more about the project without downloading the newest release right now, please feel free to have a look at these slides that have been presented at Eclipse Forum Europe or at this screencast from EclipseCon.

Summary JAX, SOACON, Eclipse Forum Europe

Did you have the chance to visit this years JAX? I thought it will be mostly about Java-related technologies. Surely, I have already heard about Scala, Rails, Groovy or JRuby, but the huge amount of different programming languages that exist nowadays and that were presented there, really overwhelmed me!

Have you already heard about F#, Newspeak, Fortress or Boo? At least, I didn't. What Markus Voelter explained in his talk about Trends in Languages 2009, was that Scala on the one side is an approach that combines an object-oriented language with ideas from functional programming. F# on the other side is the .NET derivate of the JVM-based Scala and goes the other way round: it extends a functional programming language with object-oriented concepts.
Newspeak is a further development of Smalltalk and Fortress improves Fortran. The language with the probably most interesting name (besides BrainFuck) is Boo, an object-oriented statically typed programming language.

With all these languages it's quite hard for any newcomer to understand which language to use in when situation and whether it has advantages or disadvantages in some areas. So, if you have some document that explains the difference between Ruby, JRuby, Groovy, Rails, Grails, Scala and all the others, I would be happy if you could share it! For me it seems that the box of Pandora has been opened again. A while now we only had one programming language besides .NET and that was Java. Now the pendulum points to the other side again (as Markus Voelter explained) and we have lots of different languages. We'll see how long this pendulum stays there and when it will go back again (which I think it will!) - whether it will go back to Java or a completely different programming language - nobody knows!

Besides these languages (that were presented in several talks and keynotes), JAX offered a lot of other interesting topics of course. Since it was combined with SOACON and Eclipse Forum Europe there had been a lot of talks about Eclipse, SOA and BPM which I attended.
Of course, I also had my own talk about how to execute process models where I showed some screencasts (1,2,3,4). Alas there had only been few people in the talk, but the feedback that I got from persons or via different mailing list showed that the interest of the community is there.

Most important (as always) are discussions with other people working in the same area. Here, I met quite a lot of interesting people from different companies that are also concerned about "How do I execute a model?", "What advantages does BPMN 2.0 have?", "How can I use UML for modeling an enterprise?", "Can aspect-oriented modeling assist me in my work?", etc. These discussions where really fruitful and I'm looking forward to some more on PlanetEclipse, my personal blog or maybe also our JWT mailing list.


If you want to read more about JAX, please also have a look at JAXEnter where several people blogged about their experiences in the last few days. You can also find some blog messages which I have written there, too. Als for all English guys, but they are only available in German!

With more than 1,700 attendees, it was really a successful conference and I'm already looking forward to next years JAX or this years W-JAX!

Eclipse Forum Europe in the sun, but one cloud

Today started Eclipse Forum Europe in Mainz, Germany. The weather is lovely, so it's really difficult to convince himself to go to the talks. But there are so many interesting ones that this won't be a problem at all: talks about Eclipse of course, but also a lot about SOA and BPM at SOACON and about Java and project management at JAX (all three happen in parallel).


As I'm mostly working on SOA and BPM support with Java inside Eclipse (as part of the JWT project), this combination is really perfect for me!


So, it could not be better, if we wound not have heard that Bjorn Freeman-Benson, one of the first people you think about when the name "Eclipse Foundation" is mentioned, will resign working for the foundation already from at the end of this month! So, this is a really a pity, as Mike Milinkovich in the name of the Eclipse foundation announced. One can't think about EclipseCon without Bjorn! So the Eclipse Forum Europe starts with one happy and one sad eye and it seems that between all the sun, the first cloud comes up.

Google Summer of Code and Eclipse Forum 2009

Now that EclipseCon has passed by and probably most people are back in the office again (I hope your trip back was better than mine where we needed to interrupt our flight on Iceland because of a person requiring immediate medical assistance), it's time to prepare for the next topics that are of interest for the Eclipse Community.

First, at the end of this week the Google Summer of Code deadline approaches. This is a great opportunity for students interested in developing code to get involved! Surely this covers a lot of different platforms, but there is even an own Eclipse GSoC program where we ask interested students to get involved in the various Eclipse projects. So if you have any ideas, please feel free to let us know! Post them on the GSoC Eclipse wiki page, but also send an email to the mailing list and discuss our ideas in order to get a mentor. Finally, submit your idea until Friday to the Google webpage. Besides the financial aspect (you'd get $4.500 if your proposal is selected and everything works fine during this summer) it's a great opportunity to strengthen your developing skills and to get in contact with many interesting Eclipse people!

Second, the Eclipse Forum Europe already shows up on the horizon. Happening together with JAX and SOACon in April in Mainz, Germany, it is again a good opportunity to meet people and get some more knowledge about all the interesting projects in Eclipse. Since we only had a ten minutes talk at EclipseCon, the JWT project team is looking forward to now present our ideas and existing development in a long talk.

Meetings, meetings, meetings

Yesterday I didn't have the chance to listen to many talks at EclipseCon, because I used the opportunity to meet several people. After the keynote in the morning I sat together with John Graham, the mentor of our project JWT, which I actually met here at EclipseCon the first time and his colleague Koen Aers and we talked about how we can further improve our project.
After lunch I talked with Wayne Beaton, PMC lead of Technology, about JWT and about other project ideas that spin around in my mind. Then Jerry Preissler from Sopera had some time and since we always tried to fasten the collaboration with the STP project, it was really great to have some chat.
And the evening was dedicated to the poster session, where it's of course all about meeting people and discuss your ideas and code with their ideas and code. So this was really fun, too!

That's why I can't report too much about the conference yesterday, but I promise to get to some talks today again (e.g. my own presentation together with Chris at 10.10am about "Make your processes executable!").
If you are curious about other things that happened in the last two days, maybe this German blog might also be interesting for you.