Release Notes and API Evolution Reports

The Open Source Initiative cites transparency in their prime mission statement:

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process.

It is important to consumers to know what's going on in a project because it (ideally) creates trust in the project results and in the way those are being consumed.

To help our users to keep up with the rapid (though mostly compatible) change in CDO our downloads page now provides detailed release notes and API evolution reports for each drop:

Here you can see some examples:

• Release Notes for CDO R20120612-1449
• API Evolution Report for CDO I20121028-0441

An Automated Tutorial

The EclipseCon Europe 2012 is over and it was, again, a pleasure to attend it. According to the excellent feedback I received my show in the theater has been a great success. I promised to upload the plugin that's been driving my Eclipse IDE automatically and make it available together with the slides. It's now available on the CDO homepage:

http://www.eclipse.org/cdo/documentation/presentations

You can download the ZIP archive and unzip the contained plug-in JAR to the dropins/ folder of your Eclipse IDE. After restarting Eclipse you'll see this trim widget:

By clicking the yellow arrow button (or pressing the F5 key) repeatedly you can advance through the tutorial step by step and watch your workspace being updated until you end up with a fully functional distributed application system.

Lean back and enjoy...

Now that I've Got a Model – Where's My Application?

Models are efficient for capturing enterprise knowledge at a high level of abstraction, independent of technical concerns. Using the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) I can generate an Eclipse editor for my model on a click of a button and instantly play with it. Once I've iterated on the model I need to develop an application around it to put it to use. Now I realize that modeling didn't eliminate any technical aspects, it just relieved me from thinking about them early.

What about the background threads that are expected to cooperate nicely with my model? What if real data are magnitudes bigger than the data I've played with? How do I store this data and broadcast changes to the other users of my application? Can I prevent multiple users from accidentally modifying the same object? My application seems to disappear behind a curtain of challenges until I discover that the Connected Data Objects (CDO) framework provides me with a sophisticated platform for the technical aspects of my model.

In my EclipseCon presentation today I'll tell you how best to employ the runtime aspects of these frameworks to build a scalable, transactional and distributed application for your modeled data with little more than a mouse click.

The session will be in the Theatre from 10:30 to 11:30. I've prepared quite some gimmicks for you and I'm looking forward to seeing you there...

Now that I've Got a Model – Where's My Application?

Models are efficient for capturing enterprise knowledge at a high level of abstraction, independent of technical concerns. Using the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) I can generate an Eclipse editor for my model on a click of a button and instantly play with it. Once I've iterated on the model I need to develop an application around it to put it to use. Now I realize that modeling didn't eliminate any technical aspects, it just relieved me from thinking about them early.

What about the background threads that are expected to cooperate nicely with my model? What if real data are magnitudes bigger than the data I've played with? How do I store this data and broadcast changes to the other users of my application? Can I prevent multiple users from accidentally modifying the same object? My application seems to disappear behind a curtain of challenges until I discover that the Connected Data Objects (CDO) framework provides me with a sophisticated platform for the technical aspects of my model.

In my EclipseCon presentation today I'll tell you how best to employ the runtime aspects of these frameworks to build a scalable, transactional and distributed application for your modeled data with little more than a mouse click.

The session will be in the Theatre from 10:30 to 11:30. I've prepared quite some gimmicks for you and I'm looking forward to seeing you there...

CDO 4.1 is Available

Together with the Juno release train we have released CDO 4.1.
You can download or install it from:

The release notes and documentation are also available.

I'd like to thank the CDO committers, contributors and users for another year full of exciting challenges, pleasant cooperations and major achievements. For myself CDO is a full-time job and I'd like to do no other job. Thank you for that!

CDO 4.0 SR2 is Available

Together with the Indigo release train we have released CDO 4.0 SR2. You can download or install it from:

CDO Downloads

Please note that we've fixed a severe bug in the legacy mode after SR2 had been built. The rest of CDO is unaffected but if you're using the legacy mode you should consider to update to the latest maintenance build.

One Month of Open Source Development in 60 Seconds

In October Wayne twittered that I'm ruling the Dash statistics for 2011 in terms of number of commits and that I was #4 in 2010. Looking at my usual schedule as a full time committer and lead of the CDO project I'm not too surprised.

Of course I recognize and appreciate that a pretty large team has gathered around the CDO project and is making it increasingly successful. Following our tradition to make even complex systems comprehensible I invite you to follow one month in the open source life of our swarm of little busy bumble bees:



YouTube

Thank you, team, for making CDO!

Thank you, community, for using CDO!

Thank you, gource, for this nice visualization!