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...