Community News

The Eclipse Ganymede release of 24 projects showcases the diversity and innovation going on inside the Eclipse ecosystem. Get an overview of several Ganymede projects, along with resources to find out more information.

The Eclipse Foundation next week is set to offer its annual simultaneous release of open-source project updates, this time called the Ganymede Release and featuring improvements in the core OSGI-based component model and SOA tools.

As part of the upcoming Eclipse Ganymede release which is scheduled for June 25th, InfoQ will cover a series of Eclipse subprojects. Today, the subproject is RAP (Rich Ajax Platform), which is releasing version 1.1. InfoQ spoke with Jochen Krause to learn more about RAP and what it provides.

Glimmer is a JRuby DSL that enables easy and efficient authoring of user-interfaces using the robust platform-independent Eclipse SWT library. Glimmer comes with built-in data-binding support to greatly facilitate synchronizing UI with domain models. The goal of the Glimmer project is to create a JRuby framework on top of Eclipse technologies to enable easy and efficient authoring of desktop applications by taking advantage of the Ruby language. With Glimmer having just become an Eclipse project, it's a good time to find out more.

p2 is the new provisioning system which will be provided along with the Eclipse Ganymede release on June 25th. This is one feature that I didn't really follow closely enough,so I was really happy when I called Pascal Rapicault to get an explanation from the project lead.Ian Skerrett has recently blogged about 10 reasons p2 is going to rock, and after reading this, I'm sure you'll agree.

With the ever-increasing popularity of Eclipse as an IDE as well as the Rich Client Platform, many companies and individuals are getting into the business of developing Eclipse plug-ins. Have you ever wondered what it would take to write one yourself? This installment of my Eclipse series will take you through the process of developing a simple visual plug-in. This will give you an opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of Eclipse plug-in architecture and become familiar with the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE).

This is the first in a series of four articles previewing the Eclipse Foundation's annual downloadable project release, code named Ganymede, which is set for Wednesday, June 25.

s part of the upcoming Eclipse Ganymede release, scheduled for June 25th, InfoQ is covering a series of Eclipse subprojects. Today, the topic is the Eclipse Communication Framework. InfoQ spoke with Scott Lewis, project lead for ECF and Principal at his consulting company, Composent, Inc to learn more about ECF and what capabilities it provides.

As part of the upcoming Eclipse Ganymede release, scheduled for June 25th, InfoQ will cover a series of Eclipse subprojects. Today, the subproject is Equinox p2 (Provisioning Platform), which is a framework for provisioning Eclipse-based applications. InfoQ spoke with Jeff McAffer and Pascal Rapicault to learn more about p2 and what it provides.

The Eclipse Foundation's annual code blitz - this year under the name Ganymede - kicks off at the end of this month with 24 Eclipse projects co-ordinating their new releases.
Now in its third year, this annual big push keeps getting bigger. Ganymede is Eclipse's largest co-ordinate release of updated projects to-date, beating last year's update by three.

A gradual shift that has been under way for years may now be on the verge of moving the embedded-tool industry from proprietary to open-source architectures. Recent product announcements and new project initiatives indicate that the Eclipse Framework is spilling over from its IT origins to become a dominant factor in the embedded space. It may still take a few years to solidify its position, but Eclipse appears to be on the way to overshadowing proprietary embedded tool chains.

Skyway Software, the experts in simplifying software delivery, announces today that hundreds of developers have joined the Skyway Community and taken the first participatory step in the Skyway Cup 2008 developer contest. The Skyway Cup will showcase how Skyway Community members use Skyway Builder Community Edition (CE), a model-centric JEE development tool, to serve their specific needs in the following categories:

Nach einer Umfrage, die das amerikanische CIO-Magazin unter 328 IT-Verantwortlichen durchgeführt hat, setzen bereits über die Hälfte der Unternehmen (53 Prozent) Open-Source-Software ein. Weitere zehn Prozent planen die Einführung in den nächsten zwölf Monaten. Populär sind vor allem freie Betriebssysteme (78 Prozent der Open-Source-Anwender), Infrastruktur-Anwendungen wie Webserver und Datenbanken (74 Prozent) und Entwicklertools wie Eclipse (61 Prozent).

The open source World Wind Java (WWJ) SDK by NASA creates new possibilities for the open Geographic Information Systems (GIS) community. World Wind, a 3D interactive world viewer written in the Javaâ„¢ language and OpenGL, lets users zoom from outer space into any place on Earth. This article explains how GIS developers who want to enhance their Eclipse-based applications can embed the WWJ SDK as an Eclipse plug-in.

The iPhone and iPod touch made Mobile Safari the most popular mobile browser in the United States. Although Mobile Safari is more than adequate at rendering normal Web pages, many Web developers created versions of applications aimed at the iPhone. This "Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse" series shows how to use Ruby On Rails on the server side to identify and serve custom content to Mobile Safari.

"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.

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.