Eclipse News

"We continue to struggle a bit with what developers think "Eclipse" means. They have heard of it, but they believe that we are entirely focused on Java tools when in fact we are doing so much more," says Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, in this exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan. "Our goals at Eclipse are to create an industrial-strength open source development platform that spans extensible tools, frameworks and runtimes," Milinkovich adds.

For instance, the Eclipse Foundation has a well-established IP management system. All participants in the Eclipse community sign the same exact agreement and follow the same IP processes. All Eclipse open-source project committers sign a "committer agreement" that specifies that their contribution is licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). All source code that is contributed to Eclipse projects is automatically scanned to ensure that all of the code is licensed under the EPL or a compatible open-source license.

With only a few weeks to go until Ganymede is released, already the sights are set on the future of Eclipse, referred to as E4. A recent E4 Summit debated the future goals and directions of where Eclipse is going in the future. InfoQ previously covered the scope of E4, but now it's starting to get more concrete. At this point, the E4 name is more of a code-name than a planned version number; and Eclipse 3.4 may be succeeded by 3.5 next year before E4 makes an appearance.

CoFluent Design, an electronic system level (ESL) company that delivers model-based software solutions for early system architecture exploration and performance analysis, today announced version 3.0 of CoFluent Studioâ„¢, the world-first ESL graphical modeling and simulation framework built on Eclipse technologies.

The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce the 3rd annual Eclipse Summit Europe on November 19-20, 2008, in Ludwigsburg, Germany. The Eclipse Summit is the Foundation’s premier event designed to create opportunities for the European Eclipse community to explore, share, and collaborate on the latest ideas and information about Eclipse and its members.

ie Eclipse Foundation veranstaltet vom 19. – 20. November 2008 ihren dritten Europa-Jahresgipfel, den „Eclipse Summit“, in Ludwigburg. Die Konferenz stellt den bedeutendsten Event für die europäische Eclipse Community dar. Hier erhalten die Teilnehmer die aktuellsten Informationen über die Eclipse Technologie, die Eclipse Foundation und deren Mitglieder, können sich austauschen sowie Kontakte für Kooperationen knüpfen.

I blogged last week about an example application that I’ve been building. Building good examples is pretty hard: you want an example to be simple enough to understand. At the same time, it has to be real enough to useful and expose real issues. I think that this application strikes a reasonable balance. The Eclipse Business Expense Reporting and Tracking (EBERT) application is a relatively small, but provides a valuable service. At least as a business traveler who has to work with Excel-based expense forms, it’s valuable to me.

While SkiData found Equinox a graceful environment, the move to a whole new development platform on a tight schedule was a challenge in itself. They were able to hire a professional development firm, MicroDoc GmbH of Munich, Germany, to provide Java, Equinox and Eclipse expertise while they focused their domain knowledge on business logic.

Eclipse Day at the Googleplex is a half day event for developers to learn about different Eclipse projects and related technologies. You are invited to attend and listen as experts from the Eclipse projects, Google and eBay share their experiences of using Eclipse. It's also a great opportunity for you to meet and network with other Eclipse enthusiasts. There is no cost to attend, but pre-registration is required.

Genuitec, LLC,the leading provider of the popular MyEclipse integrated development environment (IDE) and a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation, announced today the immediate availability of the initial milestone release of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 6.5.

Instantiations, Inc., a trusting provider of software quality and productivity solutions for the Eclipse platform, today announced its trade-in program for AgitarOne™ customers in light of Agitar® Software Inc.'s recent withdrawal from the market. In the same category of automated code quality products as AgitarOne, Instantiations CodePro AnalytiX is one of the most popular automated testing and quality improvement software development tools available for Java.

Motorola's mobile phone development tools revolve around an Eclipse-based IDE (integrated development environment). Currently available as MotoDev Studio 1.3 for Java ME, the tools will ship in the future with Eclipse-based plugins supporting Webkit and Linux development.

The 2008 Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose marked the event’s 20th anniversary for the conference! As always, we were interested in show attendance and how exhibitors felt about floor traffic and how it met their expectation for quality leads. At best we observed an uneven flow of traffic on the show floor where some booths were crowded and others less so. What’s more important than VDC’s observations are the comments we received from a number of exhibitor meetings at the show.

A couple of years ago, I described the Eclipse project as open source's best-kept secret, and to some extent that's still true today. Even though most in the free software world have heard of Eclipse, they are probably unaware of just how far it has come from its origins as an integrated development environment for Java.

Today, the list of its projects is extremely impressive; more importantly, it has moved way beyond its initial focus on Java and development tools to address an increasing range of enterprise computing needs.

OSGi has been mentioned quite a bit in the industry lately, with Equinox becoming a top-level project for Eclipse, Felix being used as a container for Sling and Glassfish V3, and Spring-Modules being released. That said, a lot of people who are unfamiliar with OSGi ... are still unfamiliar with it, no matter how much the people who use OSGi regularly know about it.

Coincident with JavaOne 2008, AccuRev Inc. announced the release of its process-centric software configuration management (SCM) plug-in for m2eclipse, the popular Maven plug-in for the Eclipse development environment. Maven is a Java project management and build automation tool used for building and managing any Java-based project to make the day-to-day work of Java developers easier and provide build and project management for any Java-based project.

Skyway Software, the experts in simplifying software delivery, announces today the Skyway Cup 2008 (Skyway Cup) developer contest. The Skyway Cup will showcase how Skyway Community members use Skyway Builder Community Edition (CE)

Spurred by the rapid adoption of its initial Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for MSP430 microcontrollers (MCU), Texas Instruments Incorporated today announced the release of Code Composer Essentials (CCEssentials) v3. CCEssentials v3 for MSP430 provides major upgrades designed to enhance performance, emulation and ease-of-use, all at a very low cost. Leveraging the design flexibility and interoperability enabled by the Eclipse open source platform, designers can easily integrate plug-ins for a highly customized, interoperable and flexible IDE.

Additionally, we have awarded two special prizes for the initiatives we considered groundbreaking. The VRM project lead by Doc Searls is from our point of view a very innovative approach to bring the concept of user-centric identity to customer management. During the VRM Unconference 2008 this topic has been intensively discussed for the first time in Europe. The second special prize goes to open source projects Higgins and Bandit, which we consider the most important open source initiatives in the field of Identity Management.

To celebrate the Ganymede release in June, the Eclipse Foundation is inviting individuals to organize and attend Eclipse DemoCamps around the world.