Coming up for air

Ok so it's been a while since I last post anything here, mainly because I've been working on a number of different big projects for the last couple of months and this left no time for blog posting.

So having come up for air for a few hours at least I thought it'd be a good idea to blog about them see if I can drum up some interest ;)

The major addition to my task list over the past few months has been the Sigil project. This is a set of tools to help developers build OSGi bundles. It started off as an eclipse plugin but about two or three months ago my team mate came along with some really great code to integrate it with Ivy.

I believe Sigil is the first tool out there to unify OSGi development in the IDE and server side build in a common configuration file (this being a good thing as it saves the messy job of keeping other systems in sync).

The IDE supports tools such as code complete, quick fixes and tools to analyse OSGi dependencies. I've also built in the idea of repositories (currently either file system or OBR but extensible via plugins) which allow the developer to download dependencies on the fly whilst developing by simply adding an import-package or require bundle statement to their code. Oh and the same repositories can be used in eclipse and ivy :)

The other big piece of code I've been working on is of course Newton. There are no big feature announcements for this release as we've been focussing on making the current platform more and more robust. But we've just made available the 1.3.1 release which has a number of internal improvements to reliability and scalability - I'd encourage you to take a look - one game we end up playing in the office is "Wak - A - Mole" with the containers when the fractal demo is deployed. You can take out a container (ctrl-c, ctrl-z, power cycle, cable unplug, etc) and the infrastructure will always recover :)

Anyway that seems like a good amount of detail for the time being. I'll try to blog some more about some of this stuff soon...

Laters,