Nebula Newsletter Q1-2014 / Calling New Contributors

Here is a little summary of the work that has been going on in the Nebula Project over the past half year or so.

New Committers

Three new committers joined in 2013, Dirk Fauth for Gantt, Xihui Chen for Visualization and Cedric Brun for Paperclips. A number of patches have already been accepted and Xihui is having a lot of fun accepting multiple large patches for the same code!

We have two new committers joining the ranks. Just recently Laurent Caron joined after I invited him to get the Opal widgets from EclipseLabs into Eclipse. The code has been accepted by our legal department and after the committer paperwork is done I will help Laurent to get his widgets into our repo and build system.

We are currently running a committer vote for Mirko Paturzo. Mirko brings a lot of new energy to the Grid widget. Mirko has finished a really nice contribution to the Grid widget. Speed and memory consumption have been dramatically improved and currently Mirko is attacking the open bugs list for Grid.

Gerrit and other cool releng stuff 

Thanks to Mickael Istria we are running the smoothest Gerrit workflow. Our system is now routinely being tested after every contribution to Gerrit. Accepting patches has never been so easy.

Apart from Gerrit, Mickael has also setup a Sonar instance for Nebula. It gives you information about your code in the areas of Duplications, Coding standards, Lack of coverage, Potential bugs, Complexity, Documentation and Design. Please check it out. This brings me to:

Unit Tests

Please provide Unit tests for your widgets people!

EclipseCon Europe Nebula Talk 

I have conducted a talk about the Nebula project and introduced a lot of our widgets. I did not create a Powerpoint or Prezi presentation but instead I used that other presentation tool: RCP and Nebula widgets. You can check out the sources here: https://github.com/EclipseNebula/ECE2013. By the way, the presentation was voted #8 best talk based on number of people attending and rates given. 

Project Lead

In January, Tom Schindl resigned as co-lead. I want to thank Tom for all his work in the Nebula community over the past years. I wish him the best of luck with his current endeavors which are mostly focussed on Eclipse/JavaFX integration. Tom will maintain his Nebula committer status.

I will be soliciting for a new co-lead in the near future. So please ask yourself if this is something that you want to do.

Future of Nebula

Spring has come. In a few days I will launch a discussion about the future of Nebula. Please start thinking about the things you do not like in the project so that we can discuss and change them.

 

 

Calling New Contributors

Nebula is the easiest project in Eclipse to get involved in. We have the clearest repo structure, we have the best contributor guide, we have the least dependencies, every change you make can be build locally, we have the coolest Maven/Tycho/Hudson/Sonar build system, an advanced git/Gerrit workflow and the most welcoming and friendly project lead (me ;). We will guide your first steps into the magical realm of Eclipse and Open Source development. If you are an Eclipse newcomer and you want to hone your open source contribution skills then Eclipse Nebula is the place to start. Please reply here, contact me privately or send a mail to the nebula-dev list if you are interested.

This is all I could think of for now. If I have forgotten something, please respond here, to the nebula-dev list or in a private mail to me and I will make it right.

Happy coding,

Wim Jongman