Community News

The first in the Programming Heroes category of our DZone Conversations sees us talking with Ed Merks, of EMF and Eclipse fame. The Programming Heroes series gives me the chance to talk to some of the people that I think have lead the trends in software development. The work that Ed has put behind the modelling projects at Eclipse has been tremendous. Ed had been working with IBM for a long time, and earlier this year left to do his own thing. We find out more about the projects he's interested in, as well as how Ed got into programming, and his advice for new software developers.

XMind, a leader in mind mapping, visual thinking and collaboration software, today announced XMind 3, a major release of its award-winning product. With the goal of making XMind more accessible to a broader audience and more powerful for professional users, XMind is making avaiable both a royalty-free open source edition, XMind 3, and a subscription-based professional edition, XMind Pro 3.

The Tasktop Team is very pleased to announce the Autumn 2008 release of Tasktop (v1.3). In addition to the new features that our users are accustomed to getting once per season, we are very pleased to announce a Linux version. The other big news is that Firefox users now get automatic session restore for each task, bug and issue that they work on.

Genuitec announced today the immediate availability of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 6.6. This release is focused on increased support and choice for customers standardized on Eclipse Europa (Eclipse 3.3).

Digital identity and digital identity management are key aspects of security for both home and corporate users. The capacity to validate identity and the ability to securely perform transactions online form the basis of consumer and business-to-business interactions. Without a valid digital identity and a mechanism to securely store, manage and transmit that identity, there can be no trust between transacting entities.

When investors see the margins on BIRT-related sales, the brand awareness, the new industries and geographic markets we’ve opened, and the compelling prospect of future growth, they are very impressed.

The complete developer tool update includes a new public beta of the BlackBerry JDE plug-in for Eclipse, new releases of the BlackBerry plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio, the BlackBerry MDS Studio and Plazmic Content Developer's Kit for the BlackBerry platform.

The standard IDE for Android, on the other hand, is Eclipse, which has seemingly become the de facto development environment for just about every platform other than Mac OS X and Windows. Google provides a plug-in that does a good job of integrating the Android tools with Eclipse, including a software emulator to test builds of your apps.

By choosing the Eclipse Public License as the license for the software to come out of the Symbian Foundation, the group takes a road safely chosen. The Eclipse Foundation welcomes the foundation’s support. But what about the GPL?

Research In Motion (RIM) today announced new versions of various BlackBerry developer tools that further support innovative, streamlined mobile application development for BlackBerry(R) smartphones. The developer tool updates include a new public beta of the BlackBerry(R) JDE(R) Plug-in for Eclipse, as well as new releases of the BlackBerry(R) Plug-in for Microsoft(R) Visual Studio(R), BlackBerry(R) MDS Studio, and Plazmic Content Developer's Kit(TM) for the BlackBerry platform.

Symbian released a free tool on Tuesday that lets developers see how their code performs on the mobile operating system.

The Symbian Analysis Workbench (SAW) is a prepackaged set of Eclipse-based tools for optimizing Symbian C++ code, according to the company, which is in the process of being acquired by Nokia.

Instantiations, Inc., a leading provider of Eclipse-based commercial software solutions to improve software quality and productivity, today announced an upgrade to its comprehensive code quality product, CodePro AnalytiX. Through intense automation of audits, metrics, and best practices, CodePro AnalytiX ensures superior software quality and maximum developer productivity throughout the entire code development cycle.

Seeking to establish Eclipse as the standard mobile development platform, the Eclipse Foundation on Wednesday is offering the first major release of its Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java Project (MTJ).
MTJ is a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse IDE offering capabilities for developing embedded or Java ME (Micro Edition) applications, said Christian Kurzke, project lead for MTJ and a developer tools architect at Motorola. "It's a set of tools on top of Eclipse that makes it much easier to develop mobile apps," Kurzke said.

Microsoft is throwing its support behind the creation of an Eclipse project to integrate the IDE with Silverlight technology.
The proposed project, Silverlight Development Toolkit (SLDT), was submitted by open-source solution developer Soyatec and is being co-sponsored by Microsoft. The project objective is to foster cross-platform Silverlight development with Eclipse.

Soyatec announces the launch of an Open Source project Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight, with technical and financial help from Microsoft, and the donation of one Visual Editor component used in eFace to this project.

The Eclipse Foundation officially released version 0.9 of its Mobile Tools for Java (MTJ) project. This version subsumes the previously separate EclipseME project, officials said.
MTJ’s code is designed to simplify life for software vendors who target devices from companies like Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson, using those companies’ software development kits, said project leader Christian Kurzke, a developer tools architect at Motorola.

Polarion Software, creators of fully integrated application lifecycle management solutions and services, today announced the launch of Polarion Track & Wiki. Another industry first for a software development productivity tool set, the fully integrated product delivers a full-featured bug tracker, and robust team collaboration with a wiki that breaks the information barrier that has always existed in other tracker and wiki solutions. Automated version control features with Subversion round out the product.

Learn how to use the Eclipse C Development Toolkit (CDT) to program native applications for the Apple iPhone, using open source tools to enable iPhone OS development on any Eclipse-supported platform.

Google has recently released the latest version of the Android SDK�version 0.9 beta. The Android 0.9 SDK beta brings developers a step closer to the final release that many developers are hoping to see before the end of the year. While the latest version of the SDK sports many new features (amongst them a new emulator), it contains breaking changes if you are upgrading from the previous m3 or m5 release of the SDK.

CA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CA) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the ability to share information between their respective configuration management databases (CMDBs) and management data repositories (MDRs), such as asset management systems and service desk solutions.