ekkes-corner: eclipse | osgi | mdsd | erp

February 5, 2010

redview – first snapshot online

Filed under: Eclipse, openArchitectureWare, redview — ekkescorner @ 9:10 pm

This week we published a first snapshot of redView – so if you want to take a look, here it is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/redview/

We have added much documentation to http://redview.org and there are many example projects to import into your workspace to see how redView works. But there’s also much work to do: we want to provide detailed documentation and screencasts for each example and the installation process isn’t user-friendly at the moment: P2 Update sites are missing. So it’s much work until march…

…to present at EclipseCon a Tutorial how to “Create a RCP Application with Navigation and Dynamic UI Components“: three hours hands-on with redView and red-open Software Manufactory. It’s on Monday from 9am – 12am – perhaps a good idea how to start your conference ;-)

Next week we’ll also publish a first snapshot of red-open Software Manufactory.

Using red-open you can generate the Ecore View models for redView. There are also defaults available to generate SWT Views with dynamic redView – Components or you generate a complete Protoype Application from your domain model.

red-open provides defaults how to generate the view and how to decide which UI element should be choosen for a specific data type.- so its easy to start.

Recently we also added a Mockup data generator, so you can test the Views already filled with random data:

To get this View model (.redview) generated from an UML model, you only need to execute this M2M transformation from your Xtend workflow component:

List[elements::RBase] umlToRedview(uml::Model model) :
    model.allOwnedElements().typeSelect(uml::Class)
        .defaultTransformationOfClassToRedview() ->
    transformedRBaseList();

To get SWT Views generated together with Beans, Mockup-Data, plugin.xml with Extensions to eclipse.ui.views / redView viewstore / Riena imagestore, even correctly named icons etc you only need to execute from your Xpand Generator workflow component:

// we get a list of RBase, where each RBase represents a redview View model
// we generate Beans, Mockups, Enums, Views, IDs, plugin.xml
«DEFINE Root (uml::Model model) FOR List[elements::RBase]»
	«EXPAND DefaultGenerateViewsAndBeansFromUML::Root (model) FOR this»
«ENDDEFINE»

red-open’s cartridges provide an easy way to start, but you’re free to overwrite or extend them or to use AOP. …or to ask for consulting ;-)

If something’s ‘rough’ at the moment, please have in mind the work was done from me besides my job as independent software architect and from Flo in his spare time besides his regular job. As we started the work two years ago we couldn’t imagine that our vision of a dynamic generated UI would become such a complex project published as Open Source (EPL). Originally Flo only wanted to help me with a Customer project.
…have fun with redViews snapshots – we’ll publish new snapshots each week. at the moment we provide plug-ins with source – in some weeks you’ll also get access to the sourcecode repository.

ekke

January 11, 2010

redView and more 2010

Filed under: Eclipse, Equinox, OSGI, Riena, openArchitectureWare, redview — ekkescorner @ 9:23 pm

There’s one point I failed in 2009: the proposed publishing of redView in december doesn’t happen.
The good news: progress went on and hopefully this week you can get it to download – and not only redView.
The real power of redView is the integration into a model-driven workflow and also to use one or more parts from generated runtime components.
Now there will be four Open Source projects (EPL License) and you can choose the parts you need. Here’s a short overview what you’ll get:

redView – Riena EMF Dynamic Views

redView contains a WYSIWYG editor for SWT Views based on an EMF model. You can use Drag-and-Drop to re-arrange the position of UI elements from inside the editor or outline-view. There’s also a Properties editor to change values of SWT properties or redView enhancements. All design-changes are preserved if you re-generate the View model. But redView isn’t only an editor for your Eclipse IDE – redView also has a Runtime component where UI was rendered dynamically. You can extend redView how you like it: using Eclipse Extensions or Equinox Declarative Services (DS).

A short overview:

red-open – Software Manufactory

You can use redView stand-alone like some other declarative UI frameworks – then its up to you if you define SWT Views from scratch using redView or use your own way to generate the EMF View models. red-open provides a Software Manufactory making it easy to generate redView EMF View models from your domain models: maybe UML, EMF, XSD, Xtext. red-open provides Cartridges for openArchitectureWare (Eclipse Modeling: MWE, Xpand/Xtend). red-open not only generates the Views, you can also generate Riena Navigation modules for your RCP application, Entities and more.

Here’s a short overview of red-open features:

open-erp-ware – Framework

If you’re developing Enterprise Business Applications (like ERP solutions) then perhaps open-erp-ware can reduce the time to develop. open-erp-ware provides components for RCP clients and Equinox / OSGI – server. Of course redView is used for dynamic UI rendering.

There are also many Declarative Services (DS) for Lookup, Search, Drag-n-Drop, Localization and more. As with all the other projects you can choose what helps your own projects.

open-erp-ware is tightly integrated with red-open Software Manufactory to get some parts generated and to avoid writing boilerplate of code by yourself.

ekkes-corner – fragments, bundles, utilities

If you follow my blogs then you know that I’m blogging about solutions around OSGI, Logging, MDSD, … From  now on I’ll publish my solutions on my SourceForge project.

redView, red-open and open-erp-ware are using SLF4J als Logging API and LogBack as SLF4J Implementation. You need some bundles / fragments to make it run under Equinox / OSGI – I’ll provide them at ekkes-corner project.

Our projects are also using CAL10N for Localization – to use CAL10N in OSGI applications, you have to do some work. (Of course for all mentioned projects only the use of SLF4J API is required – you can use your own OSGI logging solution. Same for use of CAL10N – there’s an ExtensionPoint in redView where you can provide your own solutions how to deal with Locale’s and Localization)

Here’s the short overview of ekkes-corner:

Eclipse Projects in-use

redView, red-open and open-erp-ware are using many Eclipse Projects. To be fair: without all these great projects at Eclipse it would be impossible to develop our projects. Thanks to all of you.

redView, red-open, open-erp-ware at SourceForge (till EclipseLabs are there)

We finally decided to host the projects at SourceForge. Don’t know what will happen in 2010 – there are already some discussions to have it under Eclipse Umbrella. There are also rumors about something like “Eclipse Labs” as a home for projects around Eclipse – perhaps for the first step this would be a solution. Feel free to talk about this with me at EclipseCon 2010 – if your’re in Munich: I’ll be at the Eclipse Stammtisch in Munich this month.

Here are the project – coordinates you can watch:

Please wait 2 or 3 days to see more content at the sites. Flo is hard working on some redView issues with dynamic collection binding and I’m refactoring some parts to reflect the project structures above and to avoid unneeded dependencies.

redView will ease your UI development, but to make it run in your specific project perhaps some initial work is needed ;-)

To get started with redView and red-open we follow a hint from Jochen Krause (thanks again, Jochen) and provide many examples from a simple HelloWorld to complex Bindings, nested Views, Master-Detail, I18N and more. stay tuned…

January 5, 2010

Enterprise Eclipse Day @ JAX2010

Filed under: Eclipse, Equinox, OSGI, Riena, redview — ekkescorner @ 8:44 pm

This year I’ll moderate the

Enterprise Eclipse Day

at JAX 2010 conference in Mainz, Germany

All sessions on this day will be in english, so if you plan a trip to germany, perhaps its a good idea to mark the first week of may in your calendar. There are some special days at JAX2010:

  1. Monday: Eclipse Modeling Day
  2. Tuesday: Eclipse Platform Day
  3. Wednesday: Eclipse Tools Day
  4. Thursday: Enterprise Eclipse Day
  5. Thursday: OSGI Day
  6. …

These are the sessions selected for the Enterprise Eclipse Day:

We’ll have a great start of the day with Chris Anisczcyk: An Introduction to EclipseRT, Equinox and OSGi

This talk will introduce people to OSGi and Equinox using the Toast example from EclipseRT. Toast is an example application meant to demonstrate a wide range of EclipseRT and OSGi technologies. It operates in the telematics and fleet management domain. Telematics is the integration of telecommunications and informatics as 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. Toast is an example of using Equinox and OSGi Services, Declarative Services, extension points, applications, HTTP service and so on. Attendees will learn how to use and extend Toast to learn more about EclipseRT technologies.


Enterprise Applications have to persist data, so the next session will be about EclipseLink.
Shaun Smith and Doug Clarke talk about: Building OSGi Applications with JPA in Eclipse

Eclipse Galileo’s Java EE distribution provides a complete JPA development and test environment for OSGi by bundling the EclipseLink runtime along with the Dali Java Persistence Tools, Plug-in Development Environment, and Data Tools Platform. This session walks through the development of a simple OSGi JPA application using Eclipse Galileo and highlights how the integrated tools are used together.


Eclipse Riena is a framework from EclipseRT to ease the development of Enterprise Applications.
Christian Campo presents: Eclipse Riena 2.0

This talk gives a short overview over the Riena framework with the emphasis on its UI concept. While RCP was clearly made for the Eclipse IDE, Riena emphasises a new/different UI and navigation concept based on existing RCP technology. Riena has a clear separation of M V C and helps avoiding boilerplate code and the resulting application is easier and intuitive to understand.


As next I’ll present (together with Florian Pirchner)
Enterprise Business Applications UI made easy with redView

Learn how to avoid writing boilerplate of code for good looking UI of Business Applications. We’ll demonstrate live: generate SWT Views from your domain model, design these Views using a WYSIWYG editor and run them in a Riena application together with Navigation and CRUD functionality. Tools and Frameworks are used from Eclipse Modeling (MWE, Xpand, UML2, EMF, CDO) and EclipseRT (Equinox OSGi, Riena).


Enterprise Applications more and more have to support mobile devices.
Lars Gentz presents How To use PushServices via BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server)

A short overview HowTo design and develope EclipseRT Enterprise Applications with integration of BlackBerry Smartphones. Setup of Eclipse IDE with BlackBerry IDE PlugIn, Overview of new Java Version from RIM, Use of Simulator, Deployment and Pushing Events and Data from EclipseRT to BlackBerry Devices.


An important part of developing Enterprise Applications is the Build System.
Karsten Thoms will demonstrate: Building Eclipse Applications with Maven Tycho

Setting up builds for Eclipse Applications is a complex and error prone task. Maven Tycho is an extension of the well-known build framework Maven which brings support for building Eclipse Plugins, Features and Applications. This session demonstrates how a full automatic build with Tycho is set up and integrated into a CI environment (Hudson).

(update: overview of the special days, updated some abstracts, also now with the Riena logo I missed before)

From my POV this day is a great demonstration how Eclipse can be used in Enterprise Applications.

But as next I couldn’t wait for EclipseCon 2010 ;-) curious if  one of my submissions will be selected

Next Page »

Blog at WordPress.com.