Community News

Microsoft Corp. today announced its first collaboration with the open source Eclipse Foundation by committing provide engineering support to allow the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) use Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The move aims to make it easier for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista, according to Microsoft.

Research In Motion (RIM) has joined the Eclipse Foundation and released a BlackBerry plug-in for Eclipse that provides the ability to develop and debug BlackBerry applications without leaving the familiar Eclipse environment. The announcement came Tuesday at the EclipseCon 2008 conference in Santa Clara, CA.

PowerSQL is Embarcadero's fourth tool built on the open-source Eclipse framework, and the company claimed this new release will improve productivity for the growing number of application developers who are becoming involved with SQL development.

Embarcadero hopes to attract developers not traditionally used to writing SQL code to its latest tool, which it said features a rich SQL integrated development environment with code-completion, real-time error-checking, code-formatting and object-validation tools to help streamline coding tasks.

Intalio, Inc., the Open Source Business Process Platform Company, today announced support for the Business Process Modeling Notation version 1.1 (BPMN 1.1), which was recently ratified by the Object Management Group (OMG). Intalio|Designer is the first process modeling tool to support the new notation. The latest version of Intalio|Designer can be downloaded from the Intalio Community Website at bpms.intalio.com.

In seeking to keep Java standardized, Sun Microsystems has turned to an open source project lead by Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) for its standard for mapping software objects into relational databases.

"This is the first Java EE (Enterprise Edition) reference implementation to ever be done at Eclipse," said Leung, interviewed at the EclipseCon 2008 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The move represents JCP and Eclipse communities coming together, Leung said.

The surprise announcement on the first day of EclipseCon 2008 was that Eclipse rival Sun Microsystems Inc. selected the Eclipse Persistence Services Project (EclipseLink), led by Oracle Corp., as the reference implementation for the Java Persistence API (JPA) 2.0.

SpringSource, keeper of the Spring Framework, is announcing Monday the planned April release of the personal edition of SpringSource Tool Suite, a toolset intended to reduce complexity of enterprise Java development.
The package also provides an end-to-end solution for middleware development using the Spring Portfolio of software, SpringSource said. In addition, the company is announcing it has joined the Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling.

CodeGear has teamed up with Instantiations, a provider of software products, services and technologies for Eclipse, Java and Smalltalk. The companies plan to add Instantiations' Swing Designer visual layout tools to CodeGear's JBuilder integrated development environment (IDE). Swing Designer will be part of the JBuilder 2008 release, due in April from CodeGear, the development-tools arm of Borland Software Corp.

Cisco has always espoused the benefits of "no technology religion" as well as open, standards-based platforms and we are pleased to share this philosophy in membership with the Eclipse Foundation.

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.