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Getting started with ECF & Dependencies on Eclipse [message #509730]

Mon, 25 January 2010 08:11

Eclipse User

Originally posted by: Florian.Rampp.jambit.com

Hello,

I'm working on a project which is trying to introduce a notion of
information and services to my client, including support of transparent
remote service invocation, information sharing, information and service
discovery and synchronization of data. I stumbled over ECF and I believe
it's a good candidate for being evaluated further.
Since your documentation is not the greatest, I would be glad about some
initial advice. Most important for me are the following two points:

1. How many dependencies does ECF have on any other Eclipse modules
(except core Equinox modules)? This is important since my client
requires a lightweight solution, running in a resource restricted
environment.

2. I'm using Maven as a build tool. Are there Maven artifacts of the
latest ECF release available?
Otherwise, where can I get the ECF 3.1 artifacts from, except by doing
an eclipse update over p2?
I also checked out the sources from the CVS repository, but this neither
provided a quick start, since I didn't really understand the repository
layout.

In the case that ECF suits our needs, we would like to dive a little
deeper into the code and there is a chance of contributing code at a
later stage of the project. So I would be very glad about some initial
advice, especially how to get ECF running without the full-fledged Eclipse.

Thanks a lot,

Florian

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Re: Getting started with ECF & Dependencies on Eclipse [message #510176 is a reply to message #509730]

Tue, 26 January 2010 10:52

Scott Lewis

Messages: 1038
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Hi Florian,

Florian R. wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm working on a project which is trying to introduce a notion of
> information and services to my client, including support of transparent
> remote service invocation, information sharing, information and service
> discovery and synchronization of data. I stumbled over ECF and I believe
> it's a good candidate for being evaluated further.
> Since your documentation is not the greatest, I would be glad about some
> initial advice. Most important for me are the following two points:
>
> 1. How many dependencies does ECF have on any other Eclipse modules
> (except core Equinox modules)? This is important since my client
> requires a lightweight solution, running in a resource restricted
> environment.

Except for some of the example apps (which have Eclipse-based user
interfaces and therefore dependencies on things like swt, jface, etc),
ECF's dependencies are indeed minimal. They do *not* depend upon
Eclipse (but rather just on OSGi and Equinox).

Specifically, the only external (non-ECF) dependencies in the remote
service API are:

(From Equinox):
org.osgi.framework
org.eclipse.equinox.common
org.eclipse.equinox.concurrent
org.eclipse.equinox.registry

The only exception for the above dependencies is the discovery UI, which
also depends upon 5 EMF bundles. It's not required that you even use
this discovery UI, however, and it's only relevant in some situations
(e.g. RCP apps that wish to use this view). Discovery can/will work
without the discovery UI.

Further, we've been very careful to use the minimum execution
environment possible...and in most cases that minimum is CDC
1.1/Foundation 1.1 (which is less/smaller than jre 1.4).

As an example, I've been using ECF recently in a small/lightweight web
server situation...here is a blog posting about some of that work:

http://eclipseecf.blogspot.com/2009/12/cloud-osgi-gwt-ecf-re st-twitter-api.html

>
> 2. I'm using Maven as a build tool. Are there Maven artifacts of the
> latest ECF release available?

No. We simply don't have the resources to do this. Since we are using
Buckminster for our own build (which is available here, btw):

https://ecf2.osuosl.org/hudson/

....and I understand that Buckminster can product Maven artifacts it may
not be a huge deal to do this, but we can't commit to doing it ourselves.

> Otherwise, where can I get the ECF 3.1 artifacts from, except by doing
> an eclipse update over p2?

You can get them from the zip available on the download page

http://www.eclipse.org/ecf/downloads.php

Here's a link directly to the zip

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/rt/ecf/3 .1/3.5/org.eclipse.ecf.sdk-3.1.0.v20091012-1618.zip

> I also checked out the sources from the CVS repository, but this neither
> provided a quick start, since I didn't really understand the repository
> layout.

Did you use the project set file we have available? This is much easier
than trying to figure out all the relevant parts and their locations in
CVS. Here are instructions for getting things from the releng project
set file:

http://www.eclipse.org/ecf/dev_resources.php

>
> In the case that ECF suits our needs, we would like to dive a little
> deeper into the code and there is a chance of contributing code at a
> later stage of the project. So I would be very glad about some initial
> advice, especially how to get ECF running without the full-fledged Eclipse.

Another thing you can do, btw, is with Eclipse 3.5 (or newer) you can
add the entire ECF SDK (which is still less than 10M btw) directly to
the target platform, and then ECF APIs will be available both at compile
time and will be automatically added to the built system as part of PDE
build.

BTW, it's my (Scott's) desire to have for Helios new/additional features
that *just* expose the remote service bundles (rather than all of ECF),
but given our current resource limitations I'm not sure if we'll be able
to do it for Helios.

I would suggest, BTW, that you consider using the ECF 3.2 stream (which
is in development/testing now and will be out Feb 19), because a big
part of that work was the move over to using the OSGI 4.2 remote
services standard as described by this post:

http://eclipseecf.blogspot.com/2010/01/osgi-remote-services- from-ecf.html

and this is quite a large break from ECF 3.1 (which was using RFC119 for
remote services standardization...and that standard is now obsolete).

Also, it might be a good idea for you to join the ECF dev mailing list:

https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/ecf-dev

The coverage of that list is higher/faster (from me, anyway :).

Also, if you want to reach me directly (I'm the project lead and could
provide direct support for your usage or even custom development) please
send an email to slewis at composent.com.

Thanks,

Scott

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Re: Getting started with ECF & Dependencies on Eclipse [message #510295 is a reply to message #510176]

Wed, 27 January 2010 07:21

Eclipse User

Originally posted by: Florian.Rampp.jambit.com

Hello Scott,

>> I'm working on a project which is trying to introduce a notion of
>> information and services to my client, including support of
>> transparent remote service invocation, information sharing,
>> information and service discovery and synchronization of data. I
>> stumbled over ECF and I believe it's a good candidate for being
>> evaluated further.
>> Since your documentation is not the greatest, I would be glad about
>> some initial advice. Most important for me are the following two points:
>>
>> 1. How many dependencies does ECF have on any other Eclipse modules
>> (except core Equinox modules)? This is important since my client
>> requires a lightweight solution, running in a resource restricted
>> environment.
>
> Except for some of the example apps (which have Eclipse-based user
> interfaces and therefore dependencies on things like swt, jface, etc),
> ECF's dependencies are indeed minimal. They do *not* depend upon
> Eclipse (but rather just on OSGi and Equinox).
>
> Specifically, the only external (non-ECF) dependencies in the remote
> service API are:
>
> (From Equinox):
> org.osgi.framework
> org.eclipse.equinox.common
> org.eclipse.equinox.concurrent
> org.eclipse.equinox.registry
>
> The only exception for the above dependencies is the discovery UI, which
> also depends upon 5 EMF bundles. It's not required that you even use
> this discovery UI, however, and it's only relevant in some situations
> (e.g. RCP apps that wish to use this view). Discovery can/will work
> without the discovery UI.
>
> Further, we've been very careful to use the minimum execution
> environment possible...and in most cases that minimum is CDC
> 1.1/Foundation 1.1 (which is less/smaller than jre 1.4).
>
> As an example, I've been using ECF recently in a small/lightweight web
> server situation...here is a blog posting about some of that work:
>
> http://eclipseecf.blogspot.com/2009/12/cloud-osgi-gwt-ecf-re st-twitter-api.html

That is good news. Seems like you designed it pretty much decoupled from
other Eclipse modules.

>> 2. I'm using Maven as a build tool. Are there Maven artifacts of the
>> latest ECF release available?
>
> No. We simply don't have the resources to do this. Since we are using
> Buckminster for our own build (which is available here, btw):
>
> https://ecf2.osuosl.org/hudson/
>
> ...and I understand that Buckminster can product Maven artifacts it may
> not be a huge deal to do this, but we can't commit to doing it ourselves.

I didn't do much work with the Eclipse platform yet (except using it as
my IDE :), so I just got in touch with Buckminster and other Eclipse
platform concepts recently.

>> I also checked out the sources from the CVS repository, but this
>> neither provided a quick start, since I didn't really understand the
>> repository layout.
>
> Did you use the project set file we have available? This is much easier
> than trying to figure out all the relevant parts and their locations in
> CVS. Here are instructions for getting things from the releng project
> set file:
>
> http://www.eclipse.org/ecf/dev_resources.php

Never new of something like a project set file, so thanks for pointing
this out. Same thing as above, I'm rather new to Eclipse as a platform.

>> In the case that ECF suits our needs, we would like to dive a little
>> deeper into the code and there is a chance of contributing code at a
>> later stage of the project. So I would be very glad about some initial
>> advice, especially how to get ECF running without the full-fledged
>> Eclipse.
>
> Another thing you can do, btw, is with Eclipse 3.5 (or newer) you can
> add the entire ECF SDK (which is still less than 10M btw) directly to
> the target platform, and then ECF APIs will be available both at compile
> time and will be automatically added to the built system as part of PDE
> build.
>
> BTW, it's my (Scott's) desire to have for Helios new/additional features
> that *just* expose the remote service bundles (rather than all of ECF),
> but given our current resource limitations I'm not sure if we'll be able
> to do it for Helios.
>
> I would suggest, BTW, that you consider using the ECF 3.2 stream (which
> is in development/testing now and will be out Feb 19), because a big
> part of that work was the move over to using the OSGI 4.2 remote
> services standard as described by this post:
>
> http://eclipseecf.blogspot.com/2010/01/osgi-remote-services- from-ecf.html
>
> and this is quite a large break from ECF 3.1 (which was using RFC119 for
> remote services standardization...and that standard is now obsolete).
>
> Also, it might be a good idea for you to join the ECF dev mailing list:
>
> https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/ecf-dev
>
> The coverage of that list is higher/faster (from me, anyway :).
>
> Also, if you want to reach me directly (I'm the project lead and could
> provide direct support for your usage or even custom development) please
> send an email to slewis at composent.com.

So, thanks a lot for all the help. I will digest all this information
now and will definitely come back to you later.

Florian

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