Community News

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.

While SkiData found Equinox a graceful environment, the move to a whole new development platform on a tight schedule was a challenge in itself. They were able to hire a professional development firm, MicroDoc GmbH of Munich, Germany, to provide Java, Equinox and Eclipse expertise while they focused their domain knowledge on business logic.

Genuitec, LLC,the leading provider of the popular MyEclipse integrated development environment (IDE) and a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation, announced today the immediate availability of the initial milestone release of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 6.5.

Instantiations, Inc., a trusting provider of software quality and productivity solutions for the Eclipse platform, today announced its trade-in program for AgitarOne™ customers in light of Agitar® Software Inc.'s recent withdrawal from the market. In the same category of automated code quality products as AgitarOne, Instantiations CodePro AnalytiX is one of the most popular automated testing and quality improvement software development tools available for Java.

Motorola's mobile phone development tools revolve around an Eclipse-based IDE (integrated development environment). Currently available as MotoDev Studio 1.3 for Java ME, the tools will ship in the future with Eclipse-based plugins supporting Webkit and Linux development.

The 2008 Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose marked the event’s 20th anniversary for the conference! As always, we were interested in show attendance and how exhibitors felt about floor traffic and how it met their expectation for quality leads. At best we observed an uneven flow of traffic on the show floor where some booths were crowded and others less so. What’s more important than VDC’s observations are the comments we received from a number of exhibitor meetings at the show.

A couple of years ago, I described the Eclipse project as open source's best-kept secret, and to some extent that's still true today. Even though most in the free software world have heard of Eclipse, they are probably unaware of just how far it has come from its origins as an integrated development environment for Java.

Today, the list of its projects is extremely impressive; more importantly, it has moved way beyond its initial focus on Java and development tools to address an increasing range of enterprise computing needs.