EclipseCon 2012 Roundup

EclipseCon is taking place this week in Reston, Virginia. It sounds like it was another lively Eclipse event.  Keeping with tradition EclipseCon started with the Eclipse Community Awards, before starting off with three days packed with great Eclipse talks, including a keynote from Ford about the car platform of the future.

OSGi R5 Early Access Specification Released

The OSGi R5 Core and Enterprise early access specifications have been made available this week, announced at OSGI DevCon.  The Core specification adds a Resource API which Alex Blewitt describes as

 .. can be used to define a general set of requirements and capabilities. This is a generalisation of the existing Import-Package and Export-Package requirements, which provide a means to write bundles together at resolution time. This information is now introspectable via the Capability and Requirement classes, along with attributes that go along with it. The connections between bundles can also be accessed via the existing BundleWiring class, which is available as an adapter on Bundle via the bundle.adapt(BundleWiring.class).

The R5 Enterprise specification focuses on applications and supporting services. The following presentation gives an overview of what's new for the spec:

The final release of the specification will be available at the end of June 2012.  Until then, you can read the full early access versions of the Core and the Enterprise

Eclipse Community Awards

In other OSGi related news from EclipseCon, ECF was awarded the Most Open Project at this years' Eclipse Community Awards. Ed Merks won the lifetime contribution award while Lars Vogel won the Top Newcomer Evangelist award. Congratulations to all winners who thoroughly deserved to win. 

The complete list of winners is as follows

Top Committer: Sven Efftinge
Top Contributors: Alex Blewitt and Stephan Herrmann
Top Newcomer Evangelist: Lars Vogel
Lifetime Contribution Award: Ed Merks
Most Open Project: Eclipse Communication Framework
Most Innovative New Feature or Eclipse Project: Eclipse Code Recommenders
Best Developer Tool: Chronon Time Travelling Debugger
Best Modeling Product: MaintainJ
Best Application: Justinmind Prototyper

For anyone who attended Tom Schindl's e4 and JavaFX related talks, you can get his slides from his blog.