Eclipse Sets Off a Big Bang

Callisto effort will culminate with 10 simultaneous project releases

By Barry Burd

May 15, 2006 —

To avoid some of the chaos that can accompany open-source team efforts, the Eclipse Foundation is orchestrating the release of 10 of its most prominent projects. The grand finale takes place near the end of June, when all 10 projects release major updates on the same day. This 10-way coordination, code-named Callisto, has been in the works since August 2005. The Callisto release includes updates to BIRT (the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project), WTP (the Web Tools Platform project), TPTP (the Test and Performance Tools Platform project) and other projects in the Eclipse dominion. Also included as part of the Callisto plan is the release of Eclipse 3.2, this year’s update of the overarching Eclipse Project.

“What if you want to use the Web Tools and the Data Tools together?” asked Bjorn Freeman-Benson, technical director of open-source process and infrastructure for the Eclipse Foundation. “Last year we released the two projects on different days. They were close, but they were still two different days. You couldn’t be sure which version of Web Tools to use with which version of Data Tools. People were confused.”

Some observers are still confused about the scope of the Callisto effort. According to an official Web page (www.eclipse.org/projects/callisto.php) describing Callisto: “While Callisto is about the simultaneous release of ten projects, it is not a unification of the projects—each project remains a separate open source project operating with its own project leadership, its own committers, and its own project plan.”

In a sense, the Callisto Simultaneous Release is more defensive than offensive. Callisto attempts to ensure that numbered releases of 10 major projects work together without coming into conflict. (For example, a plug-in associated with one project shouldn’t override a plug-in that comes with another project.) Callisto does not ensure that each project makes optimal use of another project’s features. If anything, this project synergy will be a byproduct of Callisto rather than an explicit Callisto goal.

As for structure, each of the 10 projects will follow a loosely coupled version-numbering system. For example, the Eclipse Project released in June will be version 3.2, while the Web Tools Platform will be version 1.5, and the Test and Performance Tools Platform will be version 4.2. Each project’s number will continue from where it left off (unlike Java Standard Edition, which went abruptly from version 1.4 to version 5.0). But each project will be required to

use Eclipse’s four-part numbering scheme. (Roughly speaking, the four parts of an Eclipse version number represent incompatible_revision . compatible_revision . minor_fixes . new_build.) Most important, each project will contribute its own version number to the Callisto pot. Web Tools release 1.5 will be compatible with TPTP release 4.2 because both releases belong to the Callisto effort.

SIMPLE AND UNASSUMING
Despite much anticipation among users, the Eclipse Foundation’s leaders are being modest and unassuming. “I am a little puzzled over the excitement about Callisto,” said Freeman-Benson. “People may think that it’s going to be an end-all development environment where everything is integrated. But the Callisto effort will be more or less invisible to the user community, because the things that are going to happen as a result of Callisto are that the projects are going to get cleaner. When the little things are done right, they’re invisible.”

One aspect of this invisibility is the requirement that all Callisto projects use Eclipse’s capabilities feature. In Eclipse a capability can be enabled or disabled according to a particular user’s needs. (For example, a user may see all the menus for Java Standard Edition development but none of the menus specific to Java Enterprise Edition development.) An administrator can import the capabilities list to a single user or to groups of users. With unnecessary capabilities disabled, the Eclipse interface becomes simpler, less cluttered and easier to use. The enabling and disabling of certain capabilities has been available in Eclipse for some time, but the requirement that Eclipse Project developers make enabling and disabling available for their project’s features is new with Callisto.

Another way in which Callisto is hoping to simplify the user’s life involves the new Coordinated Update Sites. Until now, installing Eclipse plug-ins meant finding possible mirror sites, choosing among mirror sites, navigating a particular site’s interface, and hoping that the site had sufficient resources for completing the download. The task was often challenging and time-consuming. In contrast, the goal for Callisto’s Coordinated Update Sites is to provide convenient one-stop shopping for certain Eclipse plug-in downloads. A Wiki page (wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Callisto

_Coordinated_Update_Sites) describes the use case for the coordinated, cross-project update site: “Allow end-users to install some minimum ‘platform’ and from that be able to use Update Manager to install all of the Callisto release, just by going to just one update site and selecting just one thing.”

In addition to providing a consistent, predictable user interface, the plans for the coordinated site tackle bandwidth and mirror disk space issues.

On the subject of installing Callisto, Freeman-Benson has some interesting insights. “We know how to install one thing, so how hard can it be to install 10 things at the same time? Well, it turns out that reliably installing 10 things at once is more difficult than people think. We were having some infrastructure issues, so we spent a lot of effort to get the installations working.”

WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NOT
Some Callisto projects will introduce major user-level changes for the June release. Others will introduce minor user-level changes, internal changes and bug fixes. For two of the projects—the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) and the Data Tools Platform (DTP)—Callisto represents a first (version 1.0) release.

All Callisto projects will use ICU4J—the Java version of IBM’s International Components for Unicode libraries. ICU4J extends Java’s standard internationalization facilities, while it maintains compatibility with the standard Java internationalization API. ICU4J provides an easy transition from the Java standard, but supports more languages and more features than the standard API.

The flagship Eclipse Project has some major revisions as part of Callisto. Themes for this Eclipse 3.2 release include scalability, enterprise readiness, extensibility and ease of use. The project boasts Java 6 compiler compliance, and includes a Java code Clean Up wizard. The Clean Up wizard finds and fixes potential problems in

Java code—problems like missing annotations, unnecessary casts, unused variables, missing parentheses and nested statements without braces.

Eclipse 3.2 will be upwardly compatible with Eclipse 3.1. (Eclipse 3.1 was released in June 2005.) This compatibility covers many levels, including the API contract, the plug-ins, the source code and the workspace. A document named the “Eclipse 3.2 Plug-in Migration Guide” describes any exceptions to these compatibility requirements.

Other projects are touting some significant user-level improvements as part of Callisto. For example, the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project will introduce “reportlets”—chunks of DHTML that may constitute parts of one or more Web pages. BIRT will also allow users to join data sets, providing greater flexibility in generating reports.

Some features will appear only as technology previews in June’s Callisto release. For example, the Web Tools Platform will demonstrate some JSF tooling and EJB 3 support, and the Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) will preview its flashy new Automated GUI Recorder.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Release candidates of Eclipse 3.2 and the other Callisto

projects are already available
at download.eclipse.org/eclipse
/downloads/index.php. Between now and the June release date, changes to the code will be bug fixes, performance improvements and other behind-the-scenes tweaks. To make the most of these final weeks, Callisto organizers are sponsoring a Great Bugs Contest.

When the June release date has passed, Eclipse organizers and team members will look back and evaluate the success of the Callisto effort. Officially, they’ll be giving the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to another yearlong effort culminating in a simultaneous release. But unofficially, the positive momentum surrounding Callisto all but guarantees a second year. “After doing this once, we can’t go back,” said Freeman-Benson. “We won’t go back and make project releases more confusing again.” The 2006-2007 effort will be named for yet another moon of Jupiter. Point your search engine to names like Io, Europa and Ganymede.

The goals of this year’s Callisto release focus on prevention, ensuring that 10 Eclipse projects keep their feature sets from interfering with one another. Next year’s focus may be more proactive, involving tighter integration among the participating projects. Projects may be expected to use one another’s public APIs or to explore ways of building on one another’s features. (For example, the TPTP and BIRT projects can now cooperate to report test and profiling data. TPTP generates the data, and BIRT generates reports from the data. The cooperative features are available within the Callisto release, but the push for these cooperative features didn’t come directly from the Callisto effort.)

The 2006-2007 coordinated release plan will probably involve more than 10 projects. (This past year, several projects expressed interest in joining the coordinated release after the initial Callisto launch. But the Callisto organizers decided to hold the line with their original 10 projects.) One way or another, projects in the Eclipse rubric will maintain their traditional independence. The TPTP project plans to do two releases per year (one release associated with Callisto, and a second “free agent” release in Q4) and other projects are free to follow suit. For the past few years, the overarching Eclipse Project has seen one major release in June of each year, and the Eclipse consortium plans to continue on this schedule.

In the long term, the Callisto model extends far beyond Eclipse. Callisto brings yet another level of respectability to open-source software. In 1984, when Richard Stallman founded the GNU project, managers envisioned unruly hackers developing buggy code for people who were unwilling to pay a decent price. But groups like Eclipse, JBoss and Red Hat have changed that perception.

JBoss’ focused business model led to its securing US$10 million in venture financing in 2004, and this year to its acquisition by Red Hat. And Eclipse has created a model in which complementary and competing companies work together toward some of their common goals. Open-source software was never the domain of outlaws and ne’er-do-wells, but nowadays industry professionals are putting their trust and their dollars in the direction of open-source software.

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