Community News

When it comes to open-source communities, individuals are much better citizens than institutions. The enlightened self-interest that causes individuals to send back bug fixes, contribute ideas for new features and write documentation is much harder to find in institutions. This week, the JargonSpy analyzes why such a gap exists and what can be done about it.

Today we complete our trilogy of interviews with the Individual Eclipse Community Awards nominees with the Top Committer nominees.

Continuing our coverage of the Individual Eclipse Community Awards, following on from yesterday's interviews with the Top Ambassador nominees, today we interview the nominees for the Top Contributor category.

The Eclipse Awards Season is in full swing this month, with voting open for the Individual Eclipse Community Awards. DZone interviewed each of the nominees for the awards, to give you a little background before you decide to vote.

ObjectAda for VxWorks leverages Wind River Workbench, an Eclipse-based development environment providing developers access to the broad range of tools available through the Eclipse framework. With support for multiple operating systems, architectures and programming languages, ObjectAda for VxWorks provides the flexibility to standardize on a single development framework.

BIRT, which is Actuate's Eclipse Foundation project, will provide interactive data for network monitoring and planning within the Web-based interface of Cisco's Secure Access Control Server.

The team researched for a suitable tool, and during that process they downloaded an evaluation copy of Squish. They used the evaluation copy to produce a proof of concept, and having successfully done this, they then contacted several companies who were already using Squish for their test efforts. After completing their research and satisfying themselves that Squish would meet their needs, they purchased their Squish licenses.
From a technical point of view, several reasons led to APC choosing Squish for automating InfraStruXure's functional GUI tests, rather than some other tool.

Replacing the existing Open AT® IDE, M2M Studio fully integrates previously isolated tools such as the source code editor, project build wizard, target download, RTE mode monitor, JTAG debugger, traces emulator and development tool chain, all within the Eclipse Ganymede framework. Eclipse and CDT (C/C++ Development Tools plug-in) are becoming the industry standard for C and C++ development in the embedded world.

Most recently CAS Software has been working on a product called CAS PIA (Personal Information Assistant) which will be a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering, the first such offering from CAS. It is built on a number of technologies which will be discussed in more detail later. This case study will take a focus on Eclipse RAP (Rich Ajax Platform) and how it was applied to the architecture of CAS PIA, as well as some interesting uses for RAP, lessons learned by CAS while using it, and future directions for their products.

Die Entwicklungsumgebung Eclipse ist ohne Frage ein sehr populäres Open-Source-Projekt, und spätestens 2004 mit Veröffentlichung der 3.x-Entwicklungsschiene hat sich die IDE-Landschaft in der Java-Welt grundlegend geändert. Mittlerweile ist Eclipse nicht mehr nur auf die Java-Programmiersprache begrenzt. 2008 waren zum Beispiel die PHP Development Tools (PDT) – also Eclipse-Plug-ins für PHP-Entwickler, um Eclipse als IDE nutzen zu können – das Eclipse-Projekt, das am zweithäufigsten heruntergeladen wurde.

Instantiations and SureAvenue, a solution provider for system consultation and system development, have announced an official reseller relationship. Under terms of the agreement, SureAvenue is exclusively licensed to resell Instantiations' GUI development, quality improvement, and software testing tools in Japan.

Jetty already has been part of several Eclipse projects, including acting as the Web and application server for Equinox, the Eclipse OSGi-based plug-in platform for application development, Webtide said.

It's hard to overstate the impact that open source technologies have had on the software industry. One recent example: Skyway Software, provider of an open-source code-generation framework for Spring-based applications, called Skyway Builder. The Tampa-based company last week announced the general availability of Skyway Builder 6.1, which is all about delivering Java EE apps for Spring. But the company started out going in a different direction.

He explained that the majority of Eclipse developers target Windows, and that Eclipse could serve as an onramp to help bring developers to Microsoft's platforms. "It's a win-win for both parties," he declared, noting that 84% of all Eclipse downloads are for the Windows platform.

The benefits of this approach are particularly strong when building multi-channel phone applications, since dedicated tools can be used for the specific technical needs of the different channels. Even better, many of these tools are available as free downloads such as the ones we take a closer look at here.

Today, DZone releases the Eclipse Modelling Framework Refcard, with all you need to get started using EMF, the most popular framework among Eclipse users and projects. Ed Merks was the primary author of this Refcard, with me co-authoring as a user of EMF. Here, Ed answers some questions about the Refcard and EMF.

As a user of EMF, I know how much this book has been anticipated, and it hasn't failed to deliver. This book will appeal to both long time users of EMF and developers who want to get started with the technology. Anyone interested in model driven development within Eclipse will learn a lot from this edition. So much in the Eclipse community is based on EMF that it is essential to understand it's architecture and capabilities.

Developers might get the picture, but Eclipse reckons it had better ramp up awareness its products among senior management as it moves beyond tools in 2009.

Eclipse Foundation marketing director Ian Skerrett has blogged it's important to help senior business and technology executives to understand the Foundation as it moves into runtimes.

Instantiations, Inc. announced v6.0 of CodePro AnalytiX, adding new OWASP-based security auditing rules, support for mock objects, new rules for web services auditing, and extended JUnit testing support for Spring, Struts and EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) frameworks.

The deepest differences may be in the language itself. Google chose Java, a language that's well understood by many new graduates. Then it built special plug-ins for Eclipse, so all of the lovers of programming Java with Eclipse can write code, push a button, and simulate running their app on the phone in a separate Java process. The tools are all available for free, and it takes only a few minutes to get the Hello World application up and running, most of which is spent waiting for Eclipse to create a bazillion objects of its own as it starts.