Yesterday JetBrains released the first milestone of the next version of IntelliJ IDEA - codenamed Maia. One of the new features of Maia is “OSGi Support”. The OSGi support in Maia is provided by a bundled version of Osmorc.

The bundling of Osmorc has several effects on Osmorc.

One of the effects is that the name “Osmorc” vanishes from the visible parts of the plugin. There’s still a place or two where it appears, but that’s only because I was lazy in replacing all occurrences with something meaningful for people who are looking for OSGi in IDEA. Now that Osmorc is bundled with IDEA that change is a logical one. People using Maia, will look for “OSGi” in the UI to find out how to get their OSGi projects working in IDEA. No one really cares which plugin provides a functionality as long as it’s there and working.

Osmorc also changed the subversion repository. While the branch for IDEA 8 is still active on Sourceforge, the new trunk for Maia is hosted by JetBrains. Osmorc is part of every new IDEA build and Osmorc’s JUnit tests are now part of IDEA’s big test suite that is executed frequently on the build servers.

As developers of a bundled plugin we can directly contact people at JetBrains with questions and as the issue tracker shows, there are quality assurance people at JetBrains testing Osmorc and posting issues for bugs and enhancements. We also have access to some resources not available publicly. We don’t need to wait for the next official EAP build of IDEA for example.

The bundling of Osmorc in IDEA is a great step for Osmorc and I’m looking forward to the future development of the plugin.

Osmorc, a plugin that enables development of OSGi based applications with IntelliJ IDEA and that is developed by Jan Thomä and me, won a “Honorable Mention” prize in the “IntelliJIDEAL Plugin 2008 contest”.

Although working on Osmorc itself and the positive and helpful feedback from its users is already a great motivation, the recognition and also the money that is part of the prize adds to it.

Neal Stephenson has written another great book — Anathem. Visit the website of the book for a short summary of what it’s about and some nice videos featuring the author himself talking about the book and reading some passages from it. BTW, the trailer that is also available on the website is totally misleading. It shows some scenes from the book but without the story surrounding the scenes, you have to get the wrong impression of it.

If you liked the Baroque Cycle you will also like this one. As the driving theme of the Baroque Cycle was science it’s philosophy in Anathem.

One reviewer from Locus wrote that it’s “porno for polymaths”. Well, I’m not a polymath and don’t know who originally came up with most of the philosophic ideas presented in the book, but you don’t need to know it to enjoy the book. The story is gripping — as usual in a book by Stephenson — and the ideas are fascinating even without making the connection to their origins.

Some time ago I ordered an iPhone 3G at T-Mobile. My current contract with T-Mobile ended this month, so it was a perfect occasion to get an iPhone. Unfortunately it wasn’t delivered, yet.

I called T-Mobile ServiceCenter today and after askinig around the guy at the ServiceCenter told me that they expect a new batch of iPhones this week. He assured me that since I ordered very early, I would be very near the top of the list and that if he could, he would deliver my iPhone personally.

Coincidentally I received a postcard from T-Mobile today: “A little pastime”. There’s an iPhone you can cut out and if you stick the right parts together, you get a little iPhone model. Awesome !!! There’s also a gift code for an iPhone silicon cover on the postcard.

Well, at least T-Mobile tries to keep their waiting customers happy.

“Halting State” is a funny nerd-book by Charles Stross.

The setting: In an online role playing game a bank is robbed. Three people, a cop, an insurance accountant - both women - and a game developer investigate the case.

The cop and the accountant do not really understand what is going on. The cop uses goggles that overlay the real world with a virtual reality providing all sorts of police information, but she doesn’t understand online games. The accountant plays some kinds of online games, but doesn’t understand how they work. The nerd — the game developer — takes the job to guide the accountant through the maze of online RPGs. He’s a Python 3000 programmer and the way he thinks and acts is really nothing new to software developers. The book contains some insider jokes probably only people working in the software development industry will understand.

Each chapter is written from the perspective of one of the three protagonists. It’s a bit unusual, because the author wrote the book in the second person. So it’s somehow like reading a text adventure with the difference that you as the reader cannot take any influence on the action.

At the end the book somewhat looses it’s drive as the author tries to tie it all up, but it is a fun book and definitely recommendable.

I have published the first release of my third IDEA plugin called Osmorc. Osmorc is a plugin that enables development of OSGI based appllications in IDEA.

Currently only some basic elements like Export-Package, Import-Package and Require-Bundle are supported, but those are the necessary building blocks for OSGI applications. Making those concepts work with IDEA’s module system, which doesn’t allow exporting and importing of specific packages, was a prerequisite for any further development of this plugin. I think I found a pragmatic way of doing it that should work in most cases.

On the home page of the plugin I’ll post more information about the plugin and how it works during the next days.

I’m now on my way to update my blogs from Movable Type 3.33 to Movable Type 4.01. The basic update was fast and easy. My templates still work and the sites can still be viewed after a total rebuild. At first the commenting functionality was broken, but that problem was resolved after the initial update through the help of the SixApart support department. So now the basic update is done. I’m currently investigating how and what new features of MT 4 to use in my blogs.

One of the features I already enabled is the possibility to log into my blogs with an OpenID for commenting. So if you have an OpenID, you can use it here to comment and don’t need a TypeKey-account to comment on my blogs. OpenID is a big topic and I’m currently looking into setting up my own identity provider. As soon as I’m done with that, I’ll post more about OpenID on this blog.

Besides this change that is apparent to the readers of my blogs, there’s also lots of changes only visible to to the blog owner. MT got a new polished UI, which I like very much. The UI of MT 3 looked somehow outdated. MT4 uses AJAX where it makes sense. For example the entry being currently edited is auto saved regularly. So it won’t get lost when somehow my Internet connection breaks and I have to re login after a time.

MT 4 has also syntax highlighting in the template editors and it discovers all module templates used in a template and provides a menu of them for direct navigation. There is no autocompletion support in the template editors, but maybe they’ll add it for MT 5 ;)

There’s also a new WYSIWYG editor for blog entries, which I don’t use because the generated HTML-code look horrible, but fortunately my preferred Markdown with SmartyPants is now integrated into MT. The editor used for typing in entries with Markdown offers some Markdown specific features like link creation and image insertion. That provides part of the convenience of the WYSIWYG editor with good HTML-code produced by Markdown.