A Letter From The Outer Space – reactions

I never have thought that there was so much movement after publishing my blogpost

‘a letter from the outer space: why developing apps for BlackBerry ?‘

I got many eMails, Comments and the post was re-published at sides like BerryReview.

Never had so many hits at my blog or at my Vimeo videos before 😉

Most feedback was positive and it will be curious to see what will happen next months and if my expectations become true.

My letter was a feedback of the anonymous letters published at BGR.com. In the meantime BGR published more anonymous letters. At BGR.com the only negative experience happened for me: I wanted to comment at the anonymous article and only wrote that I have another view on this based on my experiences as an independent developer and pointed to the URL of my blog post. …nothing appears, so I tried it a 2nd time and now I got a feedback:

wow: I was blocked from a site – this happens the very first time for me. Don’t understand why BGR isn’t interested into a fair discussion. For me this site is no serious site anymore: publishing anonymous letters, but blocking discussions ?. Not the way to gain confidence.

My letter contained positive and negative points about RIM and BlackBerry and I was impressed to get much positive feedback from RIM employees about my open words. Hopefully it will have also a positive influence inside RIM to lower bureaucracy and to ‘open’ their company 😉

…back to work… Last week I finished a customer project where 100+ truck drivers got a (BlackBerry) application to easy dispatching orders and getting auto-magically feedback if truck stands still for some minutes or is near to the depot and ready to get next orders.

I’ll blog in an extra series about GPS, Geodata, Location Based Services, Maps, Tracks, Routes and more: not only valid for BlackBerry but for all mobile platforms if you#re developing location based applications.

An article partly covering these themes will be in the next issue (9.2011) of (german) MobileDeveloper Magazin:

The cover story of current issue (04.2011) of (german) Mobile Technology Magazin is my article “Why BlackBerry rocks“:

Mobile And Enterprise Business Application Development

As you maybe know, mobile development for BlackBerry is not the only domain I’m developing for. My mobile applications are business applications and always need a server part.

This is where Eclipse Equinox, Eclipse Link, Riena and more comes into play.

Probably you know about redView (Riena EMF Dynamic Views) where Riena technology was combined with EMF based Metamodels of SWT, dynamically rendered at Runtime to ease development of business applications. I’m using redView where I need applications based on RCP / RAP.

In the meantime there are two new Open Source projects (EPL) developed by Florian Pirchner and me:

redVoodo:

based on Vaadin

OSGified Webapplications (see Kai’s demo)
Equinox OSGi, Jetty
Declarative Services (DS)

Business Applications structured similar to Eclipse Riena: SubApplications, ModuleGroups, Modules, Views, Navigation…
Push-to-Web-Clients: no polling, always up-to-date
Drag’n’Drop (per ex. Order to Truck)

enMOcs: Enterprise Mobile Communication Server based on Equinox OSGi, Jetty, EclipseLink and more to provide a robust server for:

TCP Socket Communications between mobile (or other) Clients and Server
HTTP Server
KML Services to provide KML dynamically on-the-fly for mobile devices
Push Services ro support Push Service SDK’s from different Vendors/Platforms: Android, iOS, WP7, BlackBerry
Admin UI using redVoodo

Both new projects will be developed ‘parallel’ to customer projects – first prototypes are running and you can expect first public sources for redVoodo next 10 days and for enMOcs one week later.

enMOcs is also using redVoodo as admin UI to have a simple to use and good looking UI to configure and monitor Push Services and more. This will also make development for BlackBerry Push Services SDK easier and provides a complete inside Eclipse running solution to test Push Services between server and mobile clients. Server is using SLF4J / LogBack as logging framework and (BlackBerry) mobile client also uses LogEvents in Logback format, so both can be tested side-by-side using Lilith as Logging Monitor.

Curious to see how a redVoodo Business Application could look like ? here are some screenshot directly from the labs:

Screenshots redVoodo:

Structure of a business application (configurable using EMF model)
Master-Detail (auto-magically displayed if selecting a row and edit mode is allowed, Details can be maximized)
Generic Filter Formular (Fields with AND and each field itself can have some OR conditions, RegEx and easy Entry for Dates, Time and Timestamp)
short Video Toolbar, Table, Master-Detail, hide/show Filter Area

How your redVoodo Business Application will be layouted is persisted as an EMF model and can easy be changed to fit your needs.

Together with the dynamic structure of an OSGi Application (Declarative Services used), CSS for styling and EMF you’ll be able to create your own redVoodo (Vaadin-) based web application with less work.

If talking about Business Applications and Eclipse, Riena won’t be far away 😉 We have re-used some of the great concepts from Riena, not only because they’re good – but also to be able to put a (Xtext) DSL on top of redView and redVoodo. Nature of Business Applications is similar – doesn’t matter if using Desktop Apps (RCP), WebApps (RAP, Vaadin) or even mobile Apps. BTW: you’ll also find Riena concepts like Riena’s handling of Look-and-Feel in my mobile BlackBerry Java solutions, but that’s another story to tell later.

To design the UI of business applications and generate code for redView or redVoodo – based Apps from one model, we’ll provide (sooner or later) a Xtext DSL at red-Open. Extending APPlause DSL there will also be templates to generate mobile Apps for BlackBerry additional to the other platforms supported by APPlause out of the box.

To support cross platform development for business apps is important where you don’t have control about platforms of users / customers: enMOcs is cross-platform and even will support different workflows for Push Services from different platforms to mobile clients, RCP is cross-platform by use of SWT and RAP or Vaadin support different Browsers. APPlause supports cross-platform development of native mobile apps. …. all together a solid base build on top of approved Open Source technology.

If you want to get always the newest info from redVoodo you should follow Flo’s blog posts and I’ll blog about enMOcs and red-Open.

Overview enMOcs, redView, redVoodo, …

Eclipse Indigo Highlights

I wrote some articles for JAXenter about my highlights of Eclipse Indigo in german and english:

Overview: Projects, Release Train, Marketplace, Democamps, … (german / english)
EclipseRT (RCP/RAP): Eclipse Riena, RCP, RAP, … (german / english)
EclipseRT (OSGi, Server): Equinox, Jetty, EclipseLink, Gyrex, … (german / english)
Tooling (DVCS): Egit/JGit and MercurialEclipse (german / english)
Tooling (UI): WindowBuilder (german / english)
coming soon: Modeling (X): Xtext2, Xbase, Xtend2, … (german / english)
coming soon: Modeling (EMF): CDO, EMFStore, … (german / english)

There will also soon be a new release of redView covering Eclipse Indigo, Riena 3.0 and first release of EMFStore at new home: eclipse.org.

Conferences / Events: EclipseCON Europe and more…

Meet me at next conferences / Events:

2011-07-25 Munich, mobile DevCon
2011-07-26 Cologne, App Day Mediapark
2011-09-12 … 14 Mainz, Mobile Tech Conference 2011
2011-10-18 … 20 San Francisco, BlackBerry DevCon 2011 America
2011-11-02 … 04 Ludwigsburg, EclipseCON Europe
2011-11-07 … 11 Munich, W-JAX 2011
2012-02-07 … 08 Amsterdam, BlackBerry DevCon 2011 Europe

EclipseCon Europe is nearer as you may think: now it’s time to submit your Sessions here.

Couldn’t believe: 10 years of Eclipse – and I’m using Eclipse since 9 years daily.

I have submitted sessions about:

Git and Mercurial at Eclipse – without use of CommandLine ? (Session)
Push Informations between Mobile devices and Enterprise using EclipseRT (Tutorial)
The Pusher: Push Services for mobile Devices (Session)

BlackBerry Conference Application for EclipseCON Europe and more

…also I’ll develop two versions of my BlackBerry Java – Conference App for BlackBerry OS 6 and OS 7 to demonstrate what’s possible with BlackBerry Java. This application will also communicate with enMOcs and support Push Services.

stay tuned…
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