Demo camp in Sofia this Thursday!

The Eclipse Demo Camp in Sofia is just around the corner!

This year you will not only have the opportunity to meet Mike Milinkovich on a local ground, but also to watch ten demos on a variety of Eclipse topics. Although planned as a local meetup, the demo camp naturally developed into an international event. Two of the demo speakers come from abroad - Chris Frost from SpringSource UK and Silvije Horvat from IBM CEE (Croatia).

The agenda is already finalized. The registration starts at 9:00 am. Come early to avoid the crowd on the registration desk and have a morning coffee with the organizers. The program officially starts at 10:00 am.

We have more than 80 attendees already registered. There are still few free seats available. Register on the wiki page to reserve your place! The cocktail after the demonstrations will give you the opportunity to commute with all these Eclipse friends in a relaxing environment.

See you at the demo camp!

Eclipse DemoCamp in Sofia, Bulgaria

Once again Sofia is going to host an Eclipse DemoCamp. The event will be part of the Eclipse DemoCamp Helios 2010 series, which cover almost 30 cities all over the world. The focus of the demo camp is again on short demonstrations of the Eclipse technology. There is no limitation of application areas to present.

Like before the demo camp is free and open for everyone. The same is valid for the demos – the presentation scene is open for anyone who’d like to demonstrate an interesting application of the Eclipse technology. The only requirement is to register your demo on the wiki page of the event: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_DemoCamps_Helios_2010/Sofia

New this time is that we have a special guest – Mike Milinkovich, the President of the Eclipse Foundation. Mike will have a keynote that, we believe, will raise your attention.

The event will take place on June 3^rd, 2010 from 10 am at Inter Expo Center, 147 “Tzarigradsko Chaussee” Blvd. The registration begins one hour earlier.

We invite all attendees and presenters to register on the event’s wiki page. The latter is the place to find more detailed information and news about the demo camp.

Help spreading the news by advertising the event in your network:

• Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=121686114515844


• LinkedIn event: http://events.linkedin.com/Eclipse-DemoCamp-Helios-2010-Sofia/pub/319462

The Eclipse DemoCamp in Sofia is organized by SAP Labs Bulgaria with the support of the Eclipse Foundation.

How to Setup an Eclipse Update Site on SourceForge

I needed to setup a project for Eclipse plug-ins at SourceForge.net. Like many other similar projects I'd like to deliver my releases via an Eclipse update site instead of ZIP downloads. My goal was to take the best of the SourceForge's file release system and mirror site infrastructure.

After a short googling I found out that this problem has a simple solution. Thanks to Michiel 'elmuerte' Hendriks for posting guidelines on his blog. They work like a charm.

Call for screenshots

I have mentioned earlier that the Eclipse WTP project is taking steps on improving the default layout of the Java EE perspective. We made an UI walkthrough in the Eclipse UI Best Practices group and reached consensus for some small, but valuable, things to improve. We have scheduled this small step for Galileo M3.

Before we continue the discussions on the topic, we would like to look inside the development environment of WTP users. We have some statistics from the Usage Data Collector, but it is invaluable to see how Java EE developers compose the different views in an effective and convenient perspective. We are sure that everybody has its own favourite layout depending on the screen resolution and the working style.

We will be happy if you take some minutes to submit a screenshot of your IDE on the designated wiki page.

Plans for changes in the Java EE perspective

The Java EE perspective hasn't changed much in the last years. There were only minor tweaks that surely make the things better, but nothing special yet.

Recently a discussion started on how to update the default layout in the Java EE perspective. The first suggestions came from Mik Kersten. They are related about better integration with the Mylyn project. This includes:

• adding the Task List view


• replacing the old Problems and Tasks views with the brand new Markers view

This started tickle my mind. I have an old usability problem with server management in the Java EE perspective. When I use an application server that produces logs in the standard output (like all open source servers), whenever I execute a start, stop or deploy operation, the Console view suddenly pops up and pours tons of logs on the screen. It nice to have a view on the logs, but this hides the Servers view where I can see what's happening at a glance. In such situation I always decide to change the docking location for either the Servers view or the Console view.

So, why don't we just change the default docking location of the Servers view? I find it very comfortable on the left-bottom side - under the Project Explorer view. This way I can see both the server status and the console output without any tab switching. Another benefit is that both views, which deal with projects, are on one and the same side and I can easierly drag-and-drop a project on a server instance.

Here is how the new Java EE perspective layout would look like:


Other thoughts that cross my mind are:

• why do we have the Data Source Explorer view by default?


• isn't it better to have the Snippets view docked on the right next to the Outline view rather than at the bottom?

If you have any wishes that the Java EE perspective should meet, feel free to comment in the Eclipse Bugzilla where the discussion currently happens. The community feedback is the best guarantee that we will come to great ideas!

An easy way to unit test your EJBs

Unit testing is essential part of software development. Testing POJOs with JUnit is de facto standard. But when it comes to execute unit tests on Java EE artifacts like servlets and EJB beans, a problem arises. Java EE artifacts live in a Java EE container rather than in a pure Java Virtual Machine. How do we execute our JUnits for servlets and EJBs in the environment of the Java EE container?

The Apache Cactus project tries to solve this problem for years and, indeed, it makes more and more steps towards reaching the goal. The main problem with Cactus is that you need to run your entire application server just for the sake of unit testing your EJBs. In many cases the application server could be a monster that could eat a lot of resources of your developer system.

In this post I will uncover you a little secret on how to test your EJBs in much simpler and resource efficient way. You may have already known about the Apache OpenEJB project and the lightweight and embeddable EJB container it provides. If you still miss that, then it is a good idea to take a look at my previous blog post where you will learn how to integrate it with your Eclipse IDE.

Lightweight EJB container in Eclipse

Looking for an easy and lightweight environment for developing Enterprise JavaBeans? The Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers gives you a great tooling to develop your EJBs, while Apache OpenEJB project provides an embeddable and lightweight EJB 3.0 runtime to execute them. The glue that sticks the Eclipse's and Apache's perls together is the OpenEJB Eclipse plug-in, developed by Jonathan Gallimore. In this post I will give you some kick-off hints about installing this plug-in that integrates the OpenEJB runtime with Eclipse.