Project #4 in the New Indigo Project series is the Eclipse RTP project. Holger Staudacher, the RTP project leader, has kindly answered my questions about the project.
1. What does your project provide to an Eclipse user?
The RTP Project provides packages that consists of EclipseRT Technology only. They make it easy to get started with EclipseRT. Currently we provide two packages. A basic package which includes Equinox, p2 and some configuration. The basic packages forms the base of all present and future RT Packages. The second package is a web package that includes the basic package plus jetty. This package can be used to get started with EclipseRT in the web. Besides the getting started topic the packages can be used as standalone installations. Whenever someone talk about Equinox stand alone he needed to write scripts etc. to set up his installation. All this stuff will be delivered with the RT packages.
Besides the packages, RTP provides pre-configured Amazon EC2 images with the packages installed. The images can be used to install an EclipseRT based product directly on the cloud.
2. Why are you personally involved in the project?
Personally I believe, that EclipseRT is the future of Eclipse. From my point of view, Equinox is the most important technology within the Ecosystem. I can’t imagine to do a java project without OSGi under the hood. But modularity isn’t enough. Only the available modules make up a strong platform to code against. Here EclipseRT comes into the game. EclipseRT is nothing more than a collection of high quality and widely used modules for OSGi.
While I want other people to see this the same way. I decided to create the EclipseRT Packaging project. These packages should speak for them self and convince people of the power of EclipseRT.
3. What is the future roadmap for your project?
Our goal for Indigo was to come up with two packages and a common structure how these are configured and can be used. We achieved this goal pretty well. For Juno we want to refactor our packages while keeping the structure the same. This will be necessary to come up with new RT Packages easily. Besides this there is a summer of code project how will provide a p2 http deployer and a tooling for this called “Run on Cloud”. I think this will be a great solution for getting EclipseRT into the cloud.
4. What have been your experiences of participating in the Indigo release train?
The release train was not new to me. I already participated as a committer in Galileo and Helios. But Indigo is the first time I participate as a project lead. At this point I have to thank all project leads for doing all the work for us. Of course it’s a lot of work (at least a week for me) to fulfill all the requirements. But luckily the Foundation has Wayne Beaton which created a first class documentation on this topic. I mean, the Eclipse development process including the release train requirements have been the topic of many discussion the last weeks, mainly inspired by the Jenkins guys. But I believe that such a process is absolutely necessary to provide high class open source software which can be used in the enterprise. I mean, here at Eclipse we have delivered a huge collection of Software for years and years annually. A company can be absolutely sure to have a new Eclipse release every year in June. Which other open source project can say something similar about itself? Without the development process we can’t do such a great thing. This is the reason why I can say proudly say, we will join the Eclipse Release Train again and again and again…
