It has been a busy five months for the Sapphire team since the project was created in October of 2010. The initial code contribution from Oracle has gone through the Eclipse Foundation’s IP review, we have source in CVS, bugs in Bugzilla and builds running on every commit. Even though the current project team is only staffed by Oracle employees, we make it a point to communicate in the open on the adopter forum and the developer mailing list.
Releases
Two feature releases and two service releases shipped so far.
The initial stable code contribution from Oracle, but refactored for eclipse.org namespace, build and legal requirements.
Some infrastructure work was still ongoing when 0.1 shipped. Version 0.1.1 delivered the binaries in signed form.
Major enhancements, such as a powerful resource abstraction for models, expression language, transient properties, derived properties, new property editors and many more. Despite shipping concurrently with the 0.1 release, version 0.2 represents roughly six months of new feature work that was happening as we were waiting on the project creation process.
No major release can happen without at least a few bugs getting through.
Adoption
You might ask… This technology does look promising, but how do I really know if it is ready for production?
Sapphire may be young at Eclipse, but it has been in development since at least 2007 as part of BEA’s and later Oracle’s Eclipse tooling efforts. Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE) heavily leverages Sapphire to create a variety of form based user interfaces across the product. During the transition to Eclipse, we worked quickly to close the feedback loop between the new Sapphire project and its big adopter. To that end, OEPE 11.1.1.7 shipped with Sapphire 0.1.1 and upcoming OEPE 11.1.1.7.1 will ship with Sapphire 0.2.1 release. The tight feedback loop from OEPE has enabled us to quickly stabilize the major new features delivered in the 0.2 release.
We are also getting ready to announce a major new endeavor to, in part, promote adoption of Sapphire across Eclipse. In the next few weeks, we will formally propose a project under WTP to use Sapphire to create editors for standard Java EE deployment descriptors.
Little Miss Sapphire
On February 8th, Sapphire family grew by one with the birth of Little Miss Sapphire or Amelia as she is known when she is not voicing opinions on architectural issues.
I am still mastering the art of typing with one hand. My Das Keyboard doesn’t make this easy, but I like a good challenge.
Release 0.3 and Indigo
The next major Sapphire release is scheduled to go out concurrently with Indigo in June of 2011. We are pushing improvements on two fronts.
First, we are adding support for creating diagram editors, defined and wired to the model in a similar way that forms are today. The current diagram parts renderer uses Graphiti, but the application developer will not interact with Graphiti directly, allowing renderer implementation to be changed or swapped out in the future.
By the time 0.3 ships, you will be able to create slick three-page editors showing source, form and diagram views on the same data. Bi-directional editing is so yesterday. Welcome to tri-directional editing!
Second, we are making a major push on improving the facilities provided by the SDK to make developing with Sapphire even easier. The big new feature is an editor for Sapphire UI definitions (aka sdef files). All the content assist and validation isn’t finished yet, but the editor is already much better than editing XML markup by hand. The editor is, naturally, built using Sapphire. Yesterday, I spent a good portion of the day using the sdef editor from a previous build to work on new editor features for the next build. Extreme dogfooding!
Shenxue Zhou Becomes a Committer
Shenxue has been involved with Sapphire as a consumer for a long time, but over the last several months, she has progressed to contributor status with her work on the diagram editing support. After a number of high quality patches, we welcomed Shenxue as the first elected committer on the project.
EclipseCon 2011
I am going to be giving a 20 minute talk on Sapphire at this year’s EclipseCon. No slides to bore you with. Just a live demo of building a project using Sapphire. If you are at all interested in this technology, come see the demo. It should be entertaining (one way or another).
If you cannot make it to the talk, I will be at the conference all four days, so flag me down between sessions or at the bar. Another Sapphire committer, Ling Hao, will also be attending EclipseCon this year.
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