Bringing It All Together

A header that makes sense these days in several regards.

The Annual Release

The committers of dozens of Eclipse projects have worked hard to fix bugs and integrate new features. And today is, once more, the magic day when all this work becomes available to the public in a single combined effort, called Indigo this time.

Traditionally the weeks immediately preceeding the annual release are dedicated to fixing bugs, augmenting the documentation or enhancing the homepage. So much fun!

Release Engineering Tools

It’s my belief that the only project better than a project with a process is a project with a process that is tool supported. This year I’ve taken the chance to invest into the release engineering tools of my project, the CDO Model Repository.

An incremental project builder validates the third version segment of OSGi bundles against a baseline of implementation digests, similar to what PDE’s API Tools achieve for the major and minor version numbers:


A generator for modular help plugins combines the JavaDocs of multiple source plugins and enables cross-references between them:


An automatic promotion service recognizes new builds from the continuous integration, copies them to downloads.eclipse.org, composes them into a number of p2 repositories and generates web pages.

Of course we also deliver a large number of new features with today’s CDO 4.0 release but I plan to write a separate article about those.

Eclipse Demo Camps

Yesterday I’ve been attending the Eclipse demo camp in Braunschweig. Alex has taken a nice photo of my CDO 3D show:

The camp started early, all the presenters managed to keep the schedule and many of us could round up this interesting evening at a local bar, enjoying food and drinks. Next Tuesday I’ll have the pleasure to do the same demo in Hamburg again. I'm going to bridge that time with some decent gardening.

Next Wednesday Martin and I will organize our first demo camp in Berlin. The idea was born at the end of the last EclipseCon in Santa Clara when Mike Milinkovich told me that he’d like to come to Berlin and give an Orion demo. So there we go.

The registrations have already exceeded our minimum expectation of 50 but personally I hope that Berlin and Brandenburg can do better! Please take a minute and invite your friends, colleagues and partners to this event.


The chance to talk to the director of the Eclipse Foundation will not come back any time soon for most of us. The other presenters will contribute to a cool line up, too, of course. I’m looking forward to meeting you next Wednesday evening.