Introducing the Workspace Mechanic for Eclipse

Hi Internet! I’m Robert Konigsberg, and I’ve spent the last four years working on a team that writes Eclipse plug-ins for our coworkers here at Google. I’m happy to announce that we’re open sourcing one of the tools our colleagues use every day: the Workspace Mechanic for Eclipse. I’m also excited that it is being released under version 1 of the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

The Workspace Mechanic is a publicly-released version of a tool we use at Google to automate maintenance of our engineers’ Eclipse environments. With the Mechanic, you can:

• Create a consistent environment for your entire company, your local team, or your own workspaces
• Save time setting up new workspaces
• Create tasks that ensure your favorite new preferences are applied to all your current and future workspaces. (This is one of our favorite features!)

We’re not the only ones who want a tool like this. In 2009, Ivar Meikas wrote a blog post titled “Wanted dead or alive - Eclipse configuration synchronizer!”

... why do I have to change the fonts each time I create a new workspace or turn on editor line numbers? There are some tricks, by specifying properties in some ini files, but this is really clumsy (Do you know the property name for the fonts? Without searching?). I think this is something that should be achievable without hacking.

So does anyone know if there is such a plugin that would help synchronize common properties or if there is interest for such a plugin?

Ivar, you want editor line numbers enabled in all your workspaces? Perfect; enabling that is documented as one of our examples. I hope this helps.


My colleague, Terry Parker, and I described the Workspace Mechanic at Eclipse Day at the Googleplex and at EclipseCon. Both times, people asked if we had plans to open source it. Well, yes. Yes we did.

I’m also proud that today’s announcement is part of the long-awaited launch of Eclipse Labs. The Workspace Mechanic is a perfect candidate for the Eclipse Labs, which brings the power of Google Code Project Hosting to a focused Eclipse community.

Today we are providing a code-only release. Enhancements and a p2 repository are on their way. Please check out the source code, join the mailing list, and send us your feedback.

By Robert Konigsberg, Software Engineer, Build Tools

Google Summer of Code 2010: Meet the Students!

We’ve had a great showing from students around the world for Google Summer of Code™ this year. In all, we accepted 1,026 students from 69 countries worldwide. Our top ten countries by number of students accepted this year are: United States (197), India (125), Germany (57), Brazil (50), Poland (46), Canada (40), China (39), United Kingdom (36), France (35), Sri Lanka(34).

145 of the students this year also completed projects as part of Google Summer of Code in 2009.

Meanwhile, since acceptance, all the students have been getting to know their mentors and organizations. Our Community Bonding Period ends on May 24 and coding officially starts the same day. You can find more about the upcoming events in our timeline.

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Google I/O 2010

Google I/O, Google’s largest annual developer conference, will take place on May 19-20 at Moscone West San Francisco, and nearly all of the tracks feature open sourced products -- Android, GWT, Chrome, Wave and Google APIs. We are very excited about the amount of content for open source developers this year.

Feel free to take a look at the full schedule that was recently announced. The event is completely sold out, but you can still catch the keynote presentations as they will be streamed live on the Google Developers YouTube Channel. You can also watch last year’s keynotes and session videos. Recordings from this year’s sessions will be posted on YouTube as well.

For those of you attending, Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona will be moderating a fireside chat with the Android team on Thursday, and he and members of the Open Source Programs Office will be present throughout the conference.

After many years of hard work from Googlers and the entire open source community, Chris DiBona is now ready to say, “Open Source is everywhere at Google I/O.”

Hope to see you there!

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team

Don't Copy This Code

UPDATE July 13: We have changed the name of the codelab application to Gruyere. The codelab is now located at http://google-gruyere.appspot.com.



Normally, when we release source code we're hoping that other people will build on it and improve it. Today's release of Gruyere, a small yet full-featured microblogging application, is a code release of a different sort entirely.

Gruyere has one feature that most applications usually do their best to avoid: lots of security bugs.

In fact, Gruyere was written specifically to teach about security. More specifically, it is a tool to show how to exploit web applications and, in turn, protect against those exploits when developing software. Gruyere is the software component of the "Web Application Exploits and Defenses" codelab being released today on Google Labs in cooperation with Google Code University. The codelab walks participants through a number of common web application vulnerability types and demonstrates how an attacker could exploit such vulnerabilities.

So while we don't want you to copy the code in Gruyere, we do hope you'll check it out and learn from it.

By Bruce Leban, Software Engineering Team

Shawn Pearce on FLOSS Weekly

Recently, the Google Open Source Programs Office’s Shawn Pearce appeared on FLOSS Weekly for the show’s 118th episode. FLOSS Weekly was started by Leo Laporte and Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona in 2006, and in 2009 it was nominated for a Podcast Award in the Technology/Science category.

Shawn is the creator of JGit, a reimplementation git in Java, and he spoke to hosts Randal Schwartz and Randi Harper on version control systems, including Gerrit Code Review, JGit, EGit, and Git.

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team