Community News

The Free Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation have released guidance on how each organisations' licenses, the GPL (GNU Public Licence) and EPL (Eclipse Public License), interact with each other. At the core of the debate is the question "Can you GPL an Eclipse plug-in?". The Free Software Foundation Europe were asked in an open letter to clarify whether it as was possible to create a GPL licensed plugin for the EPL licensed Eclipse platform.

I’m just back from the one day workshop “Building OSGi based applications� in Darmstadt, organized by the newly founded OSGi User’s Forum Germany. It was a very interesting day, I learned a lot and want to share my impressions and learnings.

Recently, Microsoft went public with proof-of-concept information about another Java tool that can be hosted on .Net: The Jetty HTTP server.

Microsoft announced last fall support for implementing Java Servlet and JavaServer pages using the open-source Tomcat technology. Microsoft created a Solution Accelerator to help developers who wanted to use Tomcat in place of its own Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server technology in the cloud. At the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft demonstrated how Domino’s was using TomCat on Azure.

Holger Staudacher has blogged about a forthcoming project he will be working on.
He perceives the deployment of RAP applications, as a thorny issue for developers. RAP applications are built on top of Server-Side Equinox, and Equinox has special requirements for the deployable archive.

Following the proposal of Tycho as an Eclipse project, Kai Kreuzer has posted a blog predicting big things for Tycho within the Eclipse ecosystem.

But the best role model is Eclipse, formed through IBM's 2001 donation of its Java development software. IBM executives decided to share control when they realized "they needed Eclipse to become independent to achieve their strategic goal to have the broader Java ecosystem adopt Eclipse," says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. Since then, the foundation has been able to attract outside participation not only through its formal processes, but also through new bottom-up initiatives created and led by outsiders.

That's left Eclipse executive director Mike Milkinkovich at least pragmatic and positive on what happens next in the relationship. Milkinkovich said he "absolutely believed" there's room for SWT and Swing in the industry - a view he said Oracle shares. "They are very pragmatic" he told The Reg.

Today, though, Eclipse is finally gaining traction among EDA (electronic design automation) and FPGA companies. One such EDA company, Sigasi, has just released the first commercial VHDL plugin for Eclipse. Now, at last, hardware design teams can use Eclipse as a basis for their own customized IDEs, based on the commercial and open-source plugins that they need in their central cockpit for hardware design.

Innovations Software Technology Corp., a leading provider in the market of Business Rules Management (BRM) Platforms and Financial Industry solutions, announces the release 4.7 of Visual Rules, the premier BRM Platform. This release provides new wizards and ease-of-use functionality to further enhance the intuitive, visual modeling approach of the Visual Rules Enterprise Platform.

Eclipse 4 (e4), the next generation of the Eclipse open source development tooling platform, is slated to ship in July.
Formally known as Eclipse SDK 4.0, the platform features the developer's workbench -- building blocks for constructing desktop applications or tools that work with Eclipse, said Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse's executive director, in an interview at the EclipseCon 2010 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday afternoon. Eclipse 4 offers components that go underneath the popular Eclipse IDE, he said.

Instantiations, Inc., a leading provider of Eclipse-based commercial software tools and services to improve software code quality, security and productivity, today announced new version updates across its Java product line. Highlights include updates to its popular graphical user interface (GUI) testing and design products with WindowTester Pro advancing to version 5.0 and WindowBuilder Pro, the winner of 2009 Eclipse Community Award for best development tool, moving to v. 7.4.

Red Hat has announced new Java development tools as well as a new version of its service-oriented architecture platform.
At the EclipseCon 2010 conference for developers and users of the Eclipse open-source integrated development environment (IDE) in Santa Clara, Calif., on March 22, Red Hat announced the launch of its JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0 with enhanced functionality to update its JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio.

Sonatype, caretaker of the Maven project and leading provider of enterprise software development infrastructure, today announced Sonatype Maven Studio for Eclipse. The Studio is the only Eclipse Integrated Development Environment specifically optimized for Maven, the de facto standard for Java project and build management used by more than 3 million Java developers worldwide. The Studio accelerates developer productivity through a range of innovations including one-click onboarding -- making developers fully productive in minutes rather than hours or even days.

Objectivity, Inc., the leader in distributed, scalable data management solutions, today announced the availability of their Objectivity/DB Data Store for the Eclipse Connected Data Objects (CDO) Model Repository, to be distributed through Eclipse.org starting March 22. The Objectivity/DB Data Store for Eclipse CDO gives the Eclipse community simple, pluggable access to their high-performance, distributed, scalable, NoSQL data solution, with significantly less development time and effort.

With EclipseCon 2010 just around the corner, JAXenter caught up with this year's Program Chair Oisin Hurley, to get a sneak-preview of what we can expect from EclipseCon 2010, and to get his predictions on which Eclipse projects and technologies will make an impact this year...

Sigasi, an EDA company focused on agile hardware design tools, today announced that it will make Sigasi HDT, an Intelligent Development Environment (IDE) for VHDL, available as an Eclipse plugin. As from today, Sigasi HDT will be available in two versions: as a standalone application as before, and as an Eclipse plugin. A tool license includes the right to use either version, at any time, at the customer's discretion.

Eclipse Foundation announced today that Objectivity, Inc., the leader in distributed, scalable data management technology, was named a sponsor of its popular conference, EclipseCon 2010, which will take place March 22-25, 2010 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

After releasing his latest book covering OSGi & Equinox, I took the opportunity to catch up with Jeff McAffer. In this interview we discuss the basics of OSGi, the Equinox implementation, benefits of modularity and some best practices around using Equinox.

In May, Swiss company Business Systems Integration AG (BSI) will release its Scout business application framework to the open source community. A first look at the Scout project's source code will be available to attendees at this year's EclipseCon conference, taking place from the 22nd to the 25th of March, 2010 in Santa Clara, California.

OSGi, which is intended to provide modularity for Java, is the focus of efforts afoot at IBM and the Eclipse Foundation, with IBM leveraging OSGi in its application server and Eclipse using it in a new framework for accessing enterprise technology.

With an upcoming feature pack for WebSphere Application Server (WAS) v7, IBM seeks to make it easier to use OSGi.