IBM digs in with Eclipse for weapons
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It's... "complex" IBM Rational has released an Eclipse-based tools package taking the unit back to its roots serving embedded software in an area it's calling âcomplexâ systems â otherwise known as weapons systems.â¦
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Students at North Carolina State University are learning to build business applications in the Web 2.0 mold using&#160;an IBM incubator project called Project Zero.Announced last year, Project Zero is a programming framework for rapidly building Web applications. Its pieces include a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP (hypertext preprocessor), two hot dynamic languages, along with APIs (application programming interfaces) for creating REST (representational state transfer) Web services, user interfaces, and mashups, according to IBM. It is available as a plug-in for the Eclipse integrated development environment, as well as in a version for developers who prefer to work from the command line.However, the project has faced some criticism, because although its community-driven model echoes open source, it is not an open-source project. Mark Hanny, vice president of strategic partnerships at IBM, said a commercial version of Project Zero could surface soon.James Governor, an analyst with Redmonk, suggested it makes sense for IBM to embrace newer development methods in its work with schools.&quot;IBM doesn&#39;t want to be your father&#39;s IBM, it wants to be your son&#39;s,&quot; he said.There is significant demand in the job market for such skills, according to IBM. Citing statistics from Skillproof, a research firm in Connecticut, IBM said the number of U.S. job openings for IT professionals grew 45.2 percent between 2004 and the end of last year. Knowledge of open standards and Web 2.0 development skills were in particularly high demand, according to IBM.NCSU Professor Munindar Singh said Project Zero&#39;s rapid development framework has helped students focus on higher-level issues around application development, rather than trudge at length through the deep weeds.His students generally enter the courses having learned some Java, created Web pages and done some scripting, but usually lack experience at the plumbing level, the professor said.&quot;Spending a lot of time just trying to configure an application server to do stuff for them is such a waste of time,&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s something the tool should be doing for them. ... The higher up they are in the food chain, the more creative they&#39;re going to be.&quot;According to Hanny, the IT world&#39;s needs are changing.&quot;Professors are spending a lot more time helping people at a higher level to be the architect, to be the project managers,&quot; he said. &quot;These are the jobs that are in great demand.&quot;&quot;IT is much broader. It&#39;s pervasive,&quot; he added. &quot;Some of the training is not even going on in computer science; some of it is going on in business schools.&quot;Meanwhile, IBM and the University of California-Los Angeles previously created a program within one computer science course that sees students choose their own Web 2.0 project and then work with IBM mentors to complete it.Jeffrey Tan, a UCLA senior from Palo Alto, California, built a mashup called Bounce along with two classmates. It leveraged the Facebook API along with listings from the Eventful event aggregator and maps from Google Maps. Tan&#39;s contributions focused on the application&#39;s front end.IBM officials served more as sounding boards than as direct teachers, he said. For example, the students would write a specification document for a Web site and send it to technical staffers at IBM, who would provide advice and feedback, such as what APIs to use, he said.Tan hopes to find a career building Web sites and &quot;managing back-end, server-side stuff.&quot;&quot;I just interviewed for a job, and almost all I talked about are these major Web 2.0 technologies,&quot; he said. &quot;Basically, Web 2.0 is replacing the old Web.&quot;&#160;
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InfoWorld - Casting the open-source Eclipse platform as a linchpin of product uniformity efforts, BEA Systems plans to reconfigure several middleware clients so they can be plugged into the Eclipse IDE, a company official said on Monday.
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Waves software sabre at Microsoft IBM is joining the OpenOffice.org development community, kicking off its participation by donating code it has developed for its Lotus Notes project and promising to contribute to improving the "feature richness and code quality" of OpenOffice.org.â¦
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InfoWorld - Seeking to assist software developers coping with many languages, IBM plans to offer its Safari technology to the Eclipse open source community, an IBM official said at the EclipseCon 2007 conference on Thursday.
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With an eye toward both consumer and enterprise needs, Sun Microsystems is reworking the plug-in architecture of Java in an upcoming update to Java Platform Standard Edition (SE) 6, company officials said Wednesday evening.Overall, Sun officials at a briefing in San Francisco stressed the company's new emphasis on not just the enterprise space but consumer systems as well, with the company extending Java and rich experiences to various devices.With the plug-in platform, a ground-up rewrite is under way, said Ken Russell, from the Java SE deployment team. "This will change how your poker game in [a] Web browser is run as well as your corporate app," Russell said.The new architecture is planned for inclusion in the upcoming beta of what is now being referred to as Java SE 6 Update N, due in December."Really, the defining feature of it is that it runs the applets in a separate process than the Web browser," Russell said.Features of the plug-in plan include improved scripting support and reliability. More powerful applications can be supported than in the past. Users will be able to tune an applet to run in a particular version of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE); this will enable developers to target one JRE without having to change the behavior of any other applet. Testing also will be simplified.In addition, better backing will be offered for Windows Vista, including capabilities for signed applets. Support will be offered for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 browsers as well as for Firefox 3 alpha builds and the Firefox 2 browser. Platforms capable of running the plug-in include Solaris, Windows and Linux.Current plans call for the plug-in technology to be turned on via a switch in the Java control panel.Sun also delved into other features planned for Java SE 6 Update N."Update N is about fixing the consumer experience," with a more solid browser plug-in experience and a better installation experience, said Chet Haase, Java SE client architect. Sun also wants to better enable Java for rich Internet applications.A faster startup for Java is also planned. This is important in the Web ad and lightweight game space, Haase said. Also planned is inclusion of technology from a project called Quickstarter, which preloads disk cache to bolster performance of lightweight applications. Faster graphics is planned as well, as is Nimbus, which provides a new look and feel for Java Swing client systems.Haase also noted Sun's plan for the Java Kernel, which enables downloading just the parts of Java that are needed to run an application. While that application is running, the rest of the platform is downloaded.James Gosling, chief technology officer for the Sun client software group, reviewed plans for JavaFX, which is Sun's platform for building rich, consistent user experiences for a wide variety of devices and systems."JavaFX really is a marketing term that is sort of an umbrella for a set of activities," Gosling said. The platform covers consumer-facing technologies and features a services layer based on Java and a database, a presentation layer with HTTPD, and an edge device component, covering desktops to phones to TVs."This edge part of the universe -- this is what JavaFX is all about," said Gosling.Featured in JavaFX is JavaFX Mobile, which is a software stack for mobile phones; Java SE 6 Update N, also known as the consumer JRE; the JavaFX Script scripting language, and JavaFX designer and developer tools."[JavaFX Script is] a scripting language sort of in the sense of PHP [Hypertext Preprocessor] and Python and all the rest of them. But while those are focused at generating HTML from the presentation layer outward, JavaFX Script is really all about rich user interactions," Gosling said.
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IBM is moving aggressively into the software space.
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(InfoWorld) - The Eclipse Foundation will debut technologies from 21 open-source projects simultaneously on Wednesday through its Europa release train. Europa features software updates in areas ranging from the base Java development platform to SOA, dynamic languages, and business intelligence "That represents 17 million lines of code, and that's being supported by 25 different organizations with committers working in 19 different countries," said Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich. "It's very much a multinational, worldwide scenario for pulling all these projects together." In releasing so many project updates on the same day, Eclipse reasons that it reduces complexity for adopters and removes latency in waiting for projects to ship, Milinkovich said. Eclipse offers base open-source technologies in hopes that vendors build commercial products that leverage this software and tack on value-added capabilities. Developers also can use the tools as-is. Last year's Callisto release train had just 10 projects. With Europa, Eclipse has made it easier to download projects through development of four customized packages. These are geared to the needs of Java IDE users, J2EE developers, Eclipse Rich Client Platform and Plug-in developers, and C and C++ developers. "They can come and basically get a one-click download," Milinkovich said. Eclipse's joint release of multiple projects assists ISVs who have their own release schedules to follow, said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Even with the uniform release date, Eclipse still must release APIs more frequently than once a year, said Gardner. Developers have to keep this mind, he said. A user also liked the release format. "I really admire what they're doing with the coordinated release," said Patrick Paulin, an Eclipse user and self-employed consultant with his firm, RCP Quickstart. "As a user of multiple projects, it really helps me to coordinate, to not have to worry about which versions work with [which] versions, that I can migrate all the things that I need all at one time," Paulin said. Windows Vista support in Europa was cited as a benefit by Paulin. Specifically, the Standard Widget Toolkit and Rich Client Platform, which are both part of Eclipse Platform 3.3, will enable development of applications that can run on Vista. Among the technologies shipping is Buckminster 0.1, geared for large, distributed software development projects. "What Buckminster is about is a set of frameworks and tools for automating software builds, assemblies, and deployments," Milinkovich said. The STP (SOA Tools Project) 0.6 release debuting in Europa provides a Business Process Modeling Notation modeling tool. "It's a way to draw out your business processes in an Eclipse-based editor," said Milinkovich. Developers using STP also can create and deploy SOA applications on top of Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) and Service Component Architecture (SCA) runtimes. Gardner cited Eclipse's SOA effort as a highlight of Europa. "I think that there is going to be an opportunity for a graphical approach to SOA and modeling, and like any other aspect of the tools market, people expect [tools] to be open source, and they expect them to be free," Gardner said. Also available in Europa is Dynamic Languages Toolkit 1.0, which provides a generic framework for building tools for dynamic languages, such as Perl, Ruby, and PHP. A Ruby IDE is included as well. With the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools 2.2 project, Eclipse adds support for dynamic crosstabs and output to Microsoft Word and Excel formats. Version 2.2 enables Web services to act as a data source. With these capabilities, more sophisticated reporting functionality can be integrated into Java applications. Version 3.3 of the base Eclipse Project, which hosts the Java IDE, also features a Control 3 quick-access function, providing a context-sensitive dialog to do code completion. Hyper-linking in the Eclipse debugger enables easier use. Eclipse Project also features Equinox, which is a core runtime defining a plug-in model for Eclipse. It is based on Open Services Gateway initiative. In this release, Equinox can be used as an application container on a server through HTTP, thus serving as a small application server. Eclipse Communications Framework 1.0, another part of Europa, provides a generic framework to connect communications protocols like XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) and Skype. Eclipse's Dash 1.0 technology, also known as Eclipse Monkey, enables developers to use JavaScript to customize the IDE. Developers can add function, such as build automation, said Milinkovich. Aspect-oriented programming is featured in Europa via release 1.5 of AspectJ Development Tools project. The Eclipse Modeling project, meanwhile, has been bolstered in Eclipse Modeling Framework 2.3 with support for Java 5 generics. This capability allows for development and management of more complex and flexible data models, Eclipse said. The Mylin 2.0 project, previously named Mylar, provides a way to lower the complexity of the Eclipse workbench. "What Mylin does is just show you the bits and pieces that you need," Milinkovich said. "It's a task-oriented user interface." The name was changed because Eclipse could not trademark the name Mylar, Milinkovich said. Eclipse has based its release train naming convention on the moons of Jupiter. Moons cause an eclipse and Jupiter has more than 40 moons, Milinkovich said. The full list of Europa projects can be found here. Although noted in the same box, Eclipse Modeling Framework Project and Eclipse Modeling Framework Query, Transaction, and Validation are separate projects.
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IBM this month plans to release an upgrade to its Rational Software Architect design and development tool that integrates with the IBM WebSphere Business Integration Modeler tool. The integration between the two offerings is intended to enable IT architects to take business models from the WebSphere tool and convert those to solutions via the UML-based Rational product, according to IBM officials. "They'll get a fairly good understanding of what the business process is that theyâre supposed to implement," said Alan Brown, IBM Distinguished Engineer.
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Trilog Group this week rolled out an integrated J2EE  development framework designed to let IBM Lotus Notes developers use their existing skills for J2EE development projects.
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DECEMBER 10, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Open-source vendor JBoss Inc. on Monday plans to formally announce a stack of middleware software designed to make it more competitive with the sophisticated products sold by companies like IBM, BEA Systems Inc.
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The IBM announcement is being made in collaboration with Intel. Under an agreement reached two years ago, the companies have worked together to design and manufacture blade servers.
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roundup Plus: Business Objects to bundle IBM tools...Linux clusters gear up for simulated combat...Sprint to bake in BlackBerry for businesses.
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IBM on Monday will unveil free developer resources for Cloudscape, a small-footprint, Java-based database that the company recently contributed to the Apache Software Foundation as an open source project.
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Interoperability between Eclipse and .Net should be a Microsoft goal, says Eclipse.
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(InfoWorld) - Casting the open-source Eclipse platform as a linchpin of product uniformity efforts, BEA Systems plans to reconfigure several middleware clients so they can be plugged into the Eclipse IDE, a company official said on Monday. At the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday, BEA will announce intentions to make interfaces to the following BEA AquaLogic products available as Eclipse plug-ins in the second half of 2007: * BPM Designer and BPM Studio for business process management. * Data Service Platform 3.0 for data integration and converting data to Web services. * Service Bus 3.0, which provides enterprise service bus capabilities for SOA. These moves are part of the company's Workspace 360 strategy, which is intended to provide role-specific tools that enable collaboration in an SOA. BEA seeks to provide an environment where such persons as business analysts, architects, IT operators, and managers can collaborate and have a common workspace; Eclipse plays a key role in that strategy, said Pieter Humphrey, senior product marketing manager at BEA. "The idea is to unify our tooling across all of our product lines: WebLogic, Tuxedo, AquaLogic," Humphrey said. Currently, collaboration often occurs in an ad hoc way, such as with IT personnel working together on Visio diagrams, he said. "[Collaboration] is a very common pain point," Humphrey said. By retrofitting these products as Eclipse plug-ins, the company is moving forward on its promise to make its whole product line Eclipse-friendly, according to Humphrey. "Were making good on our complete product line rather than just having pockets of Eclipse here and there," he said. While BEA has gone full speed ahead with Eclipse since joining the Eclipse Foundation in 2004, Humphrey acknowledged the company was a latecomer to the Eclipse camp. Eclipse was founded by IBM in 2001 and was spun out into a separate organization in 2004. "It wasn't clear immediately at first how mature [the Eclipse platform] was," said Humphrey. BEA's Guardian enterprise support service, released last month, uses the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), BEA noted. Also on Tuesday, BEA plans announce that Konstantin Komissarchik, a BEA staff software engineer and Eclipse architect, has been elected to the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors for one year beginning next month. BEA also will announce that Jess Garms, a senior engineering program manager at BEA, has been selected to co-lead the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project management committee.
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The software maker proposes open-source Java-based reporting tools for consideration by the Eclipse open-source foundation.