Category Archive for: ‘General’

Working with Docker under Windows becomes easier and easier. I am often ask by co-workers how to run Docker behind a firewall, this blog gives a little recipe, how to set up the whole Windows/Docker/Firewall environment.

1. Install Virtual Box
2. Download Docker Machine to manage your docker hosts
   • You find the Windows versions (32 and 64 bit) at above link
   • Rename the exe to docker-machine.exe
   • I would recommend putting the machine in a dedicated docker directory and update your PATH env variable
3. Install the Docker Windows client
   • You find it at https://get.docker.com/builds/Windows/x86_64/docker-latest.exe for 64 bit
   • Or https://get.docker.com/builds/Windows/i386/docker-latest.exe for 32 bit
   • Rename  it to docker.exe and put it in the directory where you put the machine
4. Create a Docker host named ‘dev’ with docker machine
   • docker-machine create --driver virtualbox dev
5. Connect the Docker client with the docker vm
   • Saving the environment to a .bat file: docker-machine env -shell cmd dev > docker-env.bat
   • You will get something like
     SET DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY=1
     SET DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.99.2:2376
     SET DOCKER_CERT_PATH=C:\Users\toedter_k\.docker\machine\machines\dev
     SET DOCKER_MACHINE_NAME=dev
     REM Run this command to configure your shell:
     REM FOR /f “tokens=*” %i IN (‘docker-machine env -shell cmd dev’) DO %i
   • Run the bat file (or, like docker-machine tells you, you could run the code in the last line without the REM 🙂 )
   • Check if the client is working:
     • Run docker ps in a Windows cmd
6. Prepare the proxy settings
   • SSH into the docker dev host: docker-machine ssh dev
   • Add the following lines to /var/lib/boot2docker/profile (this file is read-only, use sudo)
     export HTTP_PROXY=http://<proxy>:<port>
     export HTTPS_PROXY=http://<proxy>:<port>
   • Exit the ssh session and restart the docker machine: docker-machine restart dev

Now you should be able to use Docker on Windows behind a firewall. To test it, open a Windows cmd and run
docker run busybox echo hello world

After docker has downloaded the busybox image you should see

hello world

That’s it 🙂
Now you can easily use all Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA plugins that require a local Docker installation.

Last week I attended the JavaLand conference (March 23-24, 2015) and this is a short personal blog about it.

The Venue

The conference took place at Phantasialand, a great theme park in Brühl, close to Cologne. I really liked the atmosphere there, it reminded me a lot of Disneyland, which I visited 6 months ago. The sessions were held both in the Quantum conference center, as well as the movie theater and the main stage. At the end of the first conference day, 11 attractions of the park were opened just for the conference attendees. I took the advice of some friends very seriously: Don’t drink a beer until you have finished all the rides! When I was younger, I was a big roller coaster fan, so I tried Black Mamba, Colorado Adventure and Temple of the Night Hawk. Then I had enough of roller coasters :).

The Sessions

For many conference attendees the sessions are the most important part of a conference. In my point of view the sessions were a good mix of technical and non-technical topics. Since I am a Java veteran for 20 years, I usually only attend sessions about content that is either totally new for me or I have very little knowledge about. My personal highlights were:

• Coding Culture (by Sven Peters)
• Effective Asciidoc (by Dan Allen and Sarah White)
• Use Cases for Elasticsearch (by Florian Hopf)

Of course there were many more great talks but these 3 gave me new insights and made me think most. My own session about TypeScript went well, hopefully I could transport my excitement about TypeScript to the audience. I really appreciated that other programming languages got some attention at the conference.

The Community

I really liked the atmosphere at the conference. It was very easy for me to talk to people I did not know before. In the community area there were lots of interesting booths, playgrounds, open spaces, katas, workshops and more. It was fun to experience a few Oculus Rift demos that I did not know before. It was also very nice to meet old friends like Wayne Beaton and Lars Vogel from the Eclipse community, as well as many people I know from my JCP work or other conferences.

The Food

While many developers are happy if they get pizza or fast food, I appreciate good catering at conferences. I was invited to the community dinner on Monday, hosted in the restaurant of one of the theme hotels. This dinner was the start of great catering during the whole conference, so JavaLand easily made it into my all-time top 5 conference caterings.

The Band

I have to admit that I did not expect anything when I heard a band was playing Tuesday night. To make it short: The Band (Sonnabend) was awesome! After enjoying few songs I could not resist to dance for more than one hour. 20 years ago I played keyboards in my Band DC Robertson (see MultiMedia) so I had a special eye on the awesome keyboarder :).

Opportunities

There were a few things that I was missing: Reliable Wifi and a conference app. Another thing: When I attended sessions in the theater, it was pretty chilly. So, as always, there is room for improvements :).

Summary

All in all I liked the conference a lot and looking forward to JavaLand 2016.

Recently I worked a bit on my Eclipse 4 Application Platform Tutorial. The good news for you: The slides are now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

If you find useful stuff in the slides that you would like to re-use for talks, trainings or even for commercial use, you could do that now. You find the current slide deck either on my Web site or directly at SpeakerDeck. The corresponding source code is hosted at my GitHub repository and licensed under EPL. Here is a screenshot of the little app developed in the tutorial.

The slides as the sources are valid for both Kepler and Luna.

If you find outdated/strange/wrong things in the slides, please let me know :).

Travis CI is a cloud-based continuous integration service that supports many different programming languages and environments. If you have projects at GitHub, Travis CI might be interesting for you. I currently use it for a few of my open source projects at GitHub. Setup is quite easy, you can log in with your GitHub credentials and then you get a lit of all repos you have administration rights. Then you can configure, when Travis should run a build, e.g. on every push or pull request. The only thing you have to do is to provide a .travis.yml file at the root of your GitHub project that contains configuration info.

A few examples: my current pet project chatty has a Java back-end and a HTML/JavaScript based front-end (actually mostly written in TypeScript). For the JavaScript/TypeScript part I need node.js installed, as well as grunt, bower and tsd (TypeScript Definition Manager). The yml file looks like:

language: java
jdk:
  - oraclejdk8

before_script:
  - npm install -g grunt-cli
  - npm install -g bower
  - npm install -g tsd

script: ./gradlew test

This makes sure that the node modules grunt-cli, bower and tsd is installed before the build is run. Gradle is supported out of the box but the default is the check task. In my chatty project I have integration tests that I don’t want to run on Travis CI, that’s why I explicitly use ‘gradlew test’ as script. Make sure that the build scripts are executable. While this is a no-brainer on most operating systems, on Windows it is not so easy. But even on Windows you could use git to do the job, e.g.:

git update-index --chmod=+x gradlew

When the Travis CI build is set up, you can include a build indicator icon directory in the readme of your GitHub project. If you use markdown, the code snipped (for chatty) looks like

[![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/toedter/chatty.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/toedter/chatty)

Then a nice icon is displayed in your project description.

Eclipse based Builds
When you want to run Tycho based builds for Eclipse based projects, you only have to make sure to change to the directory of the parent pom. The yml file for my Eclipse 4 Application Platform Tutorial looks like:

language: java
jdk:
  - oraclejdk8

before_script:
  - cd org.eclipse.e4.tutorial.contacts.build.tycho

script: mvn clean install -DskipTests

I had some trouble running tests on Travis CI that involve SWT, that’s why I skip the tests.

Grails based Builds
Travis CI does not support Grails out of the box (like Gradle) but this is no problem at all since Grails provides its own Wrapper. So make sure that the wrapper is part of your project. One of our Siemens OSS projects, the REST API doc for Grails has the following yml file:

language: groovy
script: ./grailsw refresh-dependencies
     && ./grailsw test-app --echoOut

I am a big fan of Travis CI and recommend to give it a try!

Yesterday we had the Eclipse Demo Camp Munich 2013 at the Siemens campus. Around 150 attendees showed up, and from the feedback I got do far, the event was a great success.

I would like to thank

• All speakers: Ralph Müller, Tom Schindl, Gerrit Grunwald, Eike Stepper, Marcel Bruch, Jonas Helming, Eugen Nefeld, Matthias Zimmerman, Jérémie Bresson, and Matthias Sohn!
• Our sponsors: Siemens AG, EclipseSource Munich,  Eclipse Magazin (S&S Media GmbH) and EclipseScout (BSI Business Systems Integration AG)
• All attendees

You all made the demo camp a great event. My personal highlight in terms of fun factor was the release of the EMF Client Platform, when Jonas and the EMF Client Platform team pushed the BIG RED RELEASE BUTTON

and we could follow the release build live. Here is a short video:

Today I felt so good about the demo camp that I have booked the location again for next year, so stay tuned for Eclipse Demo Camp Munich 2014 🙂

Kai

You find me on Twitter and Google+.
Interested in Eclipse 4 Application Platform trainings?

There are only 10 days left and the Eclipse Democamp Munich 2013 (June 12th, 2013)  is almost sold out. As of today, there are only 11 tickets left out of 200. So hurry up, if you want to attend and haven’t registered yet. This year we will again have a great speaker lineup with interesting sessions and demos. Here is a photo of last year’s demo camp:

You can register and take a look at the agenda at http://democampmunich2013.eventbrite.com. After the sessions we will have great networking opportunities, a warm buffet and drinks.

CU next week at the Demo Camp

Kai