Community News

The Eclipse Foundation today announced the release of Eclipse Galileo, the simultaneous release of 33 projects, including the venerable Eclipse JDT. As well as the new features covered by InfoQ already, the Galileo release includes the PHP Development Tools Project, as well as stalwarts like modelling packages and the persistence layer EclipseLink (formerly known as Oracle's TopLink).

Instantiations, Inc., today announced that its entire Eclipse-based product line has been updated in conjunction with the annual Eclipse release, Galileo. In addition to adding support for Eclipse 3.5, significant new and enhanced functionality has been added across the product line. Further, Instantiations now offers a new product, WindowTester Runner, that offers GUI test execution as a separate function from test creation, ideal for large Eclipse development groups.

OSGi has been in the press a lot lately. Everywhere you turn there is some new product or project adopting the technology. From Eclipse to Apache to Spring. From servers to desktops to embedded. OSGi enables the creation of highly modular, dynamic Java-based systems.

Wondering what its all about? Join book author and Equinox OSGi project co-lead Jeff McAffer (http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780321561510) and PDE OSGi tooling lead Chris Aniszczyk for an introduction to Equinox and OSGi concepts and look at the breadth and depth of technology available in this space.

Based on the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF), an open-source project managed by the Eclipse Foundation, the TOGAF Customizer can be used to implement TOGAF 9 more easily. TOGAF is an industry-consensus framework and method for enterprise architecture (EA) developed by The Open Group, and released in February.

Excelsior JET is the first compliant Java SE implementation that supports the core of the Eclipse Runtime (Equinox OSGi) at the JVM level and enables Java code and data protection by compiling RCP applications down to native code executables.

To provide its fixed-income traders with a more integrated user experience, RBC has turned to Eclipse, an open source integrated development environment, as the basis for its global fixed-income trading applications. The ongoing project, called Helios, is targeted at bringing front-office trading applications under a single user interface.

With the announcement of Release Candidate 3, it’s a couple of weeks until Eclipse 3.5 code named “Galileo� will reach GA status. This new release of the popular Java development environment includes several new features and improvements over its previous version.

As part of its ongoing commitment to Java technology and the choice it provides to customers as well as industry-wide technology standards and open source, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) is taking a more active leadership role in the Eclipse Foundation by increasing its membership level from Strategic Consumer to Strategic Developer. SAP will provide at least eight full-time development resources to various projects and lead open source projects, ensuring direct input into the development and architecture of Eclipse.

JavaFX is a new platform for creating and deploying rich Internet applications inside a lightweight Java virtual machine. JavaFX Studio works as an Eclipse plugin for developing and deploying JavaFX applications. JavaFX Studio comes with numerous features and wizards to make JavaFX application development better.

Die Eclipse Foundation hat die Ergebnisse der weltweiten "2009 Eclipse Community Survey" in dem "Open Source Developer Report" vorgestellt. Die Foundation hatte von Mitte April bis Mitte Mai zu der Umfrage eingeladen, um Aufschluss zu erhalten, wie Entwickler die von ihnen genutzten Werkzeuge verwenden und insbesondere welche Software sie einsetzen.

Genuitec, LLC, maker of the market-leading MyEclipse software and a founding and strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation, today announced the initial milestone release (M1) of MobiOne; a new enterprise-class technology that enables development of mobile applications using Web standards.

Genuitec has announced the initial milestone release of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 7.5. The new release series delivers extensive speed upgrades, incorporates the world’s leading VisualVM Java Profiler, Remote Websphere Deployment, a Visual SQL Query Builder, ICEfaces 1.8 support and an upgrade to MyEclipse’s Visual Designers.

One of the most innovative project management and process improvement solutions to emerge in recent years, xProcess, has today been officially released under open source license. Ivis Technologies, the Colorado-based company that developed the Eclipse-based product, also announced today the formation of a new company, OpenXprocess Ltd to own, maintain and support the product and provide services to the xProcess community.

Java development tools maker Genuitec is working on innovative mobile Web development technology that will enable Web developers to build mobile applications for popular platforms, such as the Apple iPhone, without having to learn native development techniques and languages such as Objective-C. The new offering, known as MobiOne, is based on WebKit and Eclipse technology and is easily adopted by Web developers familiar with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Bredex GmbH announced today the immediate availability of GUIdancer 3.0, the automated GUI test tool, from their website (www.guidancer.com). GUIdancer has been expanded in two directions to make automated GUI testing easier and more accessible for a wider range of teams. The introduction of model-based testing lets test case designs be generated from UML models, while the new observation mode allows testers to use a running application to create tests.

License proliferation has been a hot topic amongst the open source community for the past couple of years. I am happy to report that the Eclipse Foundation and IBM have collaborated to do our bit to help by superseding the Common Public License (CPL) with the Eclipse Public License (EPL). This means that the CPL will no longer be considered an active open source license.

While at EclipseCon this year, I had the chance to talk with Greg Wilkins and Adam Lieber of Webtide. Just the night before they’d checked code into the Eclipse Foundation repositories to finish up adding Jetty as an Eclipse project. We start out discussing Jetty’s new Eclipse home.

The Scala IDE for Eclipse is centered around seamless integration with the Eclipse Java tools, providing many of the features Eclipse users have come to expect.

Michael Milinkovich, executive director of the foundation, says that when joining the group, members have to rethink many of the ways they see technology. The first assumption that needs to be jettisoned: that companies need their own versions of important programs as a way of having an edge on their competitors. "Every bank has a program they use to monitor consumer risk," he says. "But companies need to stop thinking about every line of code as a corporate asset. A great deal of code is exactly the same."

In this interview from EclipseCon, I talk with multi-RedMonkTV guest Jeff McAffer, one of the leads on the Equinox project. Having spoken with him about Equinox many times before, I start by asking him to give us an update on what’s been going on in Equinox-land of late. In doing so, we speak about how Equinox is related to the OSGi Enterprise and other specifications.