Community News

The major announcement this week at EclipseCon surrounds Equinox becoming a top level project. Just before the conference I caught up with two of the leading people in the Eclipse community to discuss this announcement and what it means.

Ian Skerrett is Director of Marketing for the Eclipse Foundation, and a regular contributor to Eclipse Zone. Jeff McAffer is Equinox Project Lead, leads the RCP project and is one of the original architects of Eclipse.

The Eclipse Foundation will branch out in the realm of component-oriented software development on Monday and also unveil an umbrella project unifying several runtime initiatives.

The efforts will be featured at the EclipseCon 2008 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Conference highlights also include a presentation by an executive from Eclipse holdout Microsoft on Wednesday.

The Eclipse Foundation is announcing a runtime initiative based on Equinox, the organization's implementation of the Open Services Gateway Initiative technology.

In an interview with eWEEK, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said the group is "announcing a runtime initiative by taking a number of projects and starting a new top level project," to be known as the Eclipse Runtime project or Eclipse RT.

I’ve mentioned previously that Eclipse is coming alive as a place for runtime technology. The last few days have seen some more concrete steps down that path. Last Wednesday the Eclipse RT top-level project had a successful creation review. So over the next few days the project itself will be provisioned and open for business. In the proposal there were 6 projects declaring their intention to move: Equinox, RAP, ECF, Swordfish, Riena and EclipseLink. While the path is now clear for these moves, I wouldn’t expect to see a mad rush.

The news at EclipseCon is something the Eclipse community has been doing for a while but not a lot of people know about it. The press announcement at EclipseCon is our new runtime initiative: the creation of the top-level Eclipse RT project and a new Equinox Community.

Earlier this week, the teams and developers working on the various projects of Eclipse began an intense debate regarding the next steps in the future of Eclipse, all triggered by the announcement of the incubation project titled 'e4'.

Skyway Software extends its support of the Eclipse community with the release of Skyway Builder Community Edition (CE), an open source development set of plug-ins built for use within the Eclipse Framework.

Zend Studio for Eclipse is the company's latest update of its PHP IDE, and carries a version number of 6.0. As a foundation, it uses Eclipse, an extensible open source platform for software development that is growing in functionality and widespread usage every year. It also utilizes the PHP Development Tools (PDT) framework.

SlickEdit Core is a plug-in for Eclipse that allows developers to use the popular SlickEdit code editor as the default editor within the Eclipse environment. SlickEdit Core consists of the SlickEdit editor, 7 additional views, and the DIFFzilla® differencing engine. Together, this functionality offers developers greater editing power and better speed in navigating code allowing even the most accomplished power programmers to be more productive.

Aptana Inc. today announced the long anticipated availability of RadRails 1.0 for Aptana Studio, the popular Eclipse-based IDE for Ajax and Web developers who use scripting languages like Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript. RadRails 1.0, the first major release of the RadRails software since Aptana became home to the community project last year, provides unparalleled features for Ruby on Rails developers. The free, open source download for RadRails 1.0 can be found at http://www.aptana.com.

froglogic GmbH will announce its new Eclipse strategy at EclipseCon 2008 taking place in Santa Clara next week. froglogic is the vendor of the leading, cross-platform automated GUI testing tool Squish. Squish supports creating and running automated GUI tests of applications based on a variety of user interface technologies including Trolltech's Qt toolkit, Java AWT/Swing/NetBeans, Java SWT/Eclipse RCP/JFaces, Web/HTML/AJAX and Mac OS X Carbon/Cocoa.

The RCP Training Series kicks off this summer, covering a wide range of locations. To get more insight into what to expect from the training, I talked with Dr Jörn Weigle representing WeigleWilczek, a member of the Eclipse Training Alliance.

The new debugger includes all of the features developers might expect in a modern debugger, including stepping, run to breakpoint, smart step, variable introspection, hot swap, remote debugging and a free-form expression analyzer, company officials said. This contribution has been underwritten by CodeGear and implemented by xored.com, the company behind the DLTK (Dynamic Languages Toolkit) project. The entire debugger is being contributed to Eclipse.org as part of DLTK, CodeGear officials said.

Earlier this month, the Eclipse Foundation announced the release of Higgins 1.0. Higgins is a suite of identity management solutions from the Eclipse foundation, created with the intent of simplifying and adding consistency to online authentication. The software infrastructure provided by Higgins is specifically targeted at providing a consistent interaction for users with multiple authentication protocols:

The Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) defines an architecture for developing and deploying modular applications and libraries. In this first article in a three-part introduction to OSGi, Sunil Patil gets you started with OSGi development concepts and shows you how to build a simple Hello World application using the Eclipse OSGi container implementation, Equinox. He also touches briefly on building service-oriented applications using OSGi and introduces OSGi's ServiceFactory and ServiceTracker classes.

BEA Workshop 10.2 is here and it’s faster than ever. Developers will experience noticeable speed improvements in server start, deployment, incremental & clean build, and the stability of 885+ resolved software defects.

This release updates BEA Workshop for WebLogic, BEA Workshop Studio with Adobe Flex Builder 2, and BEA Workshop for JSP.

Download your free trial or free copy and give it a try!

The Object Management Group™ (OMG™) and the Eclipse Foundation are jointly organizing two, one-day symposia to promote and build on the partnership between Eclipse’s open source software and OMG’s open standards. The first event is part of EclipseCon 2008 in Santa Clara on March 20, 2008; the other is during the OMG Technical Meeting in Ottawa, Canada on June 25, 2008.

MBARI has been making the headlines recently as a high-profile JBuilder 2007 Enterprise Edition user. In this Exclusive Q&A with SYS-CON's PowerBuilder Developer's Journal, MBARI Senior Software Engineer Kevin Gomes talks about the role of Eclipse in that decision, about the LiveSource UML modeling tool, code testing, and the relationship between scientists and engineers.

Genuitec has announced the immediate availability of "MyEclipse 6.1 Blue Edition," a toolsuite tailored specifically for IBM WebSphere users. This first milestone release is available for free trial download and use through April 1, 2008.

Over the past few decades the amount of information available at our fingertips has steadily grown. We have become so overloaded with hundreds of emails, thousands of files and millions of lines of code that we often spend more time repeatedly looking for information than getting work done. Its time to reclaim our workday. Starting today, you will be able to use the Task-Focused Interface for managing all of your work. For Eclipse users, this means the productivity benefits of Mylyn now extend to your file and web browsing activities.