Eclipse News

"Embarcadero's release of EA/Studio Community Edition expresses the company's continued endorsement of Eclipse-based software," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director, Eclipse Foundation. "We're pleased to see Embarcadero bring its expertise in commercial database tools to the Eclipse community. This new offering underscores the increased productivity and flexibility that can be achieved by leveraging the Eclipse platform with first-class software like Embarcadero's database tools."

Focusing on the enterprise, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) tools vendor Zend Technologies is shipping Tuesday version 3.6 of its Zend Platform application server for PHP as well as Zend Studio for Eclipse, an IDE for PHP based on Eclipse open source technology.

The Eclipse Foundation today announced the support of eleven industry-leading companies as Gold Sponsors for EclipseCon 2008, the annual conference of the Eclipse community.

The deadline for nominations for the Annual Eclipse Community Awards is fast approaching. Visit http://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation/eclipseawards/awards_nominations.php for more information.

In the third quarter of this year, Swordfish is scheduled to emerge from incubation as the SOA runtime integrated with Eclipse SOA Tools Project (STP) and the Web Tools Project (WTP), Deutscher said. Swordfish will also make the best use of both JBI and SCA, ending that rivalry, and employ OSGi to replace Java EE and even Spring, he added.

While at the Eclipse Runtime Summit, I had the chance to talk with Iona's Eric Newcomer (CTO of Iona, Co-Chair, Enterprise Expert Group, OSGi Alliance, and well respected enterprise coding guy) about the emergence of OSGi as a server-side, or enterprise technology.

JBuilder 2007 is an IDE built on the open source Eclipse framework, which makes development of Java and Web-based collaborative applications faster and more reliable. JBuilder 2007 combines the advantages of the Eclipse framework with JBuilder's innovative rapid application development (RAD) functionality, ease-of-use and productivity, and collaborative capabilities that help developers and organizations more effectively manage complex projects across locations and teams.

In this two part screencast, I talk with Andy Smith about the Eclipse SODA project, part of the Eclipse OHF effort. In the first part, Andy gives us an overview of the device populated network with edge and centralized servers that SODA services. He then explains the Stepstone use-case for in-home medical monitoring devices that serves as an example use of SODA.

In this two part screencast, Jochen Krause and I talk about the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform, or RAP for short. RAP is a front-end framework that uses the Eclipse RCP programming model to create Ajax front-ends in Java. In the first part, Jochen gives us an overview of RAP and how it fits into the overall Eclipse runtime and then shows a few demos of using RAP in the second part.

And how can we discuss the year in Java without mentioning the largest and most complex update ever engineered for Eclipse? Version 3.3, code-named Europa, saw more than 2 million downloads between June and the writing of this article in early December. That's certainly the most interest the project has ever gathered around a new release.

Based on technology from German logistics company Deutsche Post, Swordfish features an SOA runtime platform that leverages three popular projects: Service Component Architecture (SCA), Java Business Integration (JBI), and Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi). SCA provides a common programming model and assembly description format while JBI serves as a common messaging model. OSGi, which is the basis of the Eclipse runtime platform, provides common deployment and runtime component models in Swordfish.

In this tutorial I propose a quick step-by-step guide to start developing your OSGi bundles using Eclipse IDE and a standalone Equinox implementation.

We will begin by first describing the BIRT designer, which is used to build report designs, and conclude by discussing the example BIRT Viewer, which is used to deploy the designs and generate the completed reports.

Eclipse and OMG are jointly organising two one-day symposia to promote and build on the partnership between Eclipse's open source software and OMG's open standards - one as part of EclipseCon 2008 in Santa Clara, the other during the OMG Technical Meeting in Ottawa. Each symposium will be organised as a series of discussion sessions on corresponding OMG standards and Eclipse projects. In each case the purpose will be to discuss the alignment between current standard and implemented software, and identify areas where the cooperation could be further improved in future.

froglogic GmbH today announced version 3.3 of the leading, cross-platform automated GUI testing tool Squish. Squish supports creating and running automated GUI tests of applications based on many user interface technologies including Trolltech's Qt, Java AWT/Swing/NetBeans, Java SWT/Eclipse RCP, Web/HTML/AJAX and Mac OS X Carbon/Cocoa. Squish is being successfully used in QA departments across the world in companies such as Reuters Financial Software, EADS, Siemens, Synopsys, Xilinx, Trolltech and France Telecom Group.

Genuitec, LLC, the leading provider of the popular MyEclipse integrated development environment (IDE) and a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation, today announced the availability of MyEclipse Reports, a professional integration and enhancement of the Eclipse BIRT project. MyEclipse Reports is available on startup to MyEclipse Professional Edition users at no charge via the "Community Essentials" program, and provides an enterprise-ready reporting solution to the MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench.

Today, OSGi has become the platform of choice for many software vendors. The majority of Java Enterprise Edition application servers support or plan to support the technology, for example. In addition, many open source initiatives have already begun to integrate OSGi into their server-side frameworks. This trend certainly will facilitate adoption of OSGi in the enterprise. For the first time, we might have one software component model that allows for the convergence of embedded, desktop, and enterprise software development. It's about time.

The Eclipse Community Awards are an annual event designed to show appreciation to individuals and technologies that make Eclipse a stronger community. There are two categories of awards - individual and technology. The Eclipse Foundation is now accepting nominations for the awards, so show your love and nominate a person or product that has made a difference.

The EclipseCon 2008 technical program has been selected and is now available on the conference web site. Thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal to the program committee. The number and quality of submissions received was tremendous so the program committee had a difficult time selecting the sessions, but it has made the final program exceptionally strong.

In this podcast, we take that thought to the next logical step. Let's talk to the guys that make the tools for open source software. So in the above downloadable file, we spend 5 minutes with Mike Milinkovich, representing the leading developer of OSS tools, the Eclipse Foundation. We wanted Mike's vision for the Foundation for 2008 and beyond.