Eclipse Reeling in Swordfish as SOA Framework
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The Eclipse Foundation is developing an open source SOA framework intended for applications ranging from enterprise environments to embedded systems.
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Russ asks: Where's the OpenSocial container API? I love Russ because he cuts through all the BS and gets right to the core, most basic question, and he doesn't care who he pisses off. That's my kind of developer. You can't lie to the compiler, when the bits hit the road, you gotta know what garbage goes in and what garbage comes out.  (Ahh programmer's humor!) In other words, suppose I wanted to compete with Google, MySpace, Plaxo and LinkedIn, well, where's the spec that shows me how to do that? Well, of course I don't know, they aren't communicating with riffraff like me, but I have some experience with this kind of stuff, so I can hazard a guess. If they publish a spec,all kinds of projects will likely get started to enable the API in (just for the sake of argument): Drupal, WordPress, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Scripting News (why not add widgets to a random blog), CNN, The New York Times, well you get the idea. There might be lots of implementations very quickly. And that would be it for changes. It would be frozen de facto, they'd have to live with what they have, which given how quickly it was thrown together, probably isn't very good. Not the kind of stuff you'd like to support for the next decade or two. Or maybe they would break everyone, something guaranteed to make them a lot of enemies, much the way Microsoft did, and they were good at migration of APIs.  Google is good at doing AJAXy web UIs, they make users happy, but they're not very good at APIs. This one is a loser, for sure. That's the answer to Russ's question. It's probably not malice that keeps them from releasing details to everyone outside their club, it's pragmatism. They have to try to hold on to it to keep it from becoming even more of a mess than it already is. Just my opinion, for what it's worth. I've been wrong many times before.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems this week offered a rare glimpse of its upcoming SOA (service-oriented architecture) tool set, called WorkSpace 360, with a demonstration of a prototype tool currently under development. "We're moving towards having the ability to do metadata-driven development," said Bill Roth, vice president of BEA's Workshop Business Unit, during an interview in Singapore. In the future, developers will spend most of their time creating metadata that describes the application and how it behaves, "rather than a bunch of sentences that end with semicolons," he said. "There will always be the need to write code, there will always be the need to do the lower-level stuff. But I think we can do better," Roth said. The heart of WorkSpace 360 is called WorkSpace Central, a set of tools designed for developing and managing applications built usingÂ BEA's upcoming SOA 360 platform. Scheduled to be introduced starting next year, WorkSpace 360 is designed to bring business analysts, architects, developers and IT operations executives together in a shared workspace. WorkSpace 360 will cover BEA's entire product lineup, including a mix of rich-client tools based on Eclipse and Web-based versions. "It starts potentially with AquaLogic and leveraging AquaLogic business-process management. There then will be a piece which we've previously called AquaLogic Composer, which will evolve into a bunch of tools, including a service assembly modeller," Roth said. The service assembly modeller, which is based on the SCA (Service Component Architecture) specification developed by BEA and IBM, gives users a view of how different services are connected and how they communicate, Roth said. The service assembly modeller can scan a set of services available from a registry or a data-services platform and display the connections that exist between them. The result, as demonstrated using a prototype of the tool on Roth's laptop, is a flow chart of available services, including SCA notations for each service. "What you'll be able to do ultimately is [click the] right mouse button on the links and annotate them," Roth said, noting these annotations will be saved to the metadata repository. Developers and other team members will then be able to access the annotations, he said. The service assembly modeller and other WorkSpace 360 tools are expected to be available during the first half of 2007. "Maybe sooner," Roth said.
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TechWeb - Eclipse is central in IBM's strategy to compete with Microsoft's Visual Studio.net. Both packages offer the ability for developers to plug multiple toolsets into shared environments.
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InfoWorld - Borland Software this week is rolling out an upgrade to its Together enterprise modeling tool for the Eclipse platform, featuring SOA capabilities.
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(InfoWorld) - The Eclipse Foundation at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference in Cambridge, Mass., this week plans to tout the progress of open source projects focused on desktop application development, PHP (Hypertext Processor) and embedded Java. Honing in on a recent Evans Data survey that Eclipse and several member organizations funded, Eclipse will herald an annual growth rate of 130 percent in the number of respondents building applications based on Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform). The RCP is Eclipse's answer to the Windows juggernaut for development of desktop applications. Approximately 22 percent of the 400 respondents in this year's survey indicated they were building applications based on RCP. RCP features Equinox, which is a component framework based on the OSGi standard, and the ability to deploy native GUI applications to several desktop operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Also featured is an integrated update mechanism for deploying desktop applications from a central server. Although development of applications for the Web has been taking the headlines lately, rich client applications still have a place, said Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse executive director. There will always be a need for applications on the desktop that take advantage of local computing resources and can work in both disconnected and connected fashions. While RCP can be used for building Windows applications, Eclipse views it as a competitor to the Windows platform. "[RCP] has the additional advantage that you can take applications and run on Linux, Mac, and Windows, but we definitely see this as an alternative to Windows .Net," Milinkovich said. Organizations such as SAS Institute, NASA, and the US Army feature RCP in applications, he said. Eclipse also has a new project just getting started for rich Internet applications, called the Rich AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Platform project Also at the show, Eclipse plans to talk about upcoming developments such as the impending release of its PHP IDE project. "We are expecting our PHP tools project to be making [its] first release in Q4," Milinkovich said. "In Q4, we're expecting our Mobile Tools for Java project to be shipping and our embedded RCP project will be shipping as well," Milinkovich said. Mobile Tools for Java features a set of development tools for programmers building applications for mobile devices running Java. Embedded RCP is a runtime to extend the RCP to embedded devices. In the next few months, Eclipse plans maintenance releases to fix any bugs in its Callisto project, which was launched in June and featured the simultaneous release of 10 open source projects. The first maintenance release is on Sept. 29 while a second is planned for approximately Feb. 1, 2007. Also at EclipseWorld, Instantiations is announcing Version 2.0 of RCP Developer, which is a development tool for building Eclipse RCP applications. The new version adds a Help Composer feature, to ease documentation, and extends Linux support for the RCP Packager and WindowTester features. WindowTester feature automates testing of GUIs for Linux while RCP Packager streamlines the build and deployment process. Version 2.0 is centered on making it easier to focus on developing business logic rather than maintaining infrastructure code. Eclipse on Sept. 11, meanwhile, plans to have a creation review for the Eclipse Orbit Project. The project will provide a repository of bundled versions of third-party libraries that are approved for use in one or more Eclipse projects, according to the Eclipse Web site. Older versions of such libraries will be maintained by the repository as well. "One of the key issues with the current situation is the inconsistency in naming, versioning, and form of bundled third party libraries. This project will, as a mainline activity, provide a repository of approved and bundled third party libraries to authorized project teams. This eliminates duplicated work and bundle naming, structuring and versioning variations," the Eclipse site said. Also on Sept. 11, Eclipse will be reviewing its AspectJ Development Tools Project for aspect-oriented software development (AOSD), according to the organization's Web site. "The AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) project provides Eclipse platform-based tool support for AOSD with AspectJ," the Eclipse site said.
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(InfoWorld) - Ingres began offering a software bundle on WednesdayÂ to make it easier for developers to build Eclipse-based applications on top of the Ingres 2006 open-source database. The Ingres Eclipse Bundle brings together all the components developers need to create and run Java applications built using the Eclipse Foundation's open-source development framework. Available for download from the Ingres Web site as a single zipped file, the bundle includes a version of the Eclipse framework and the Ingres Eclipse DTP (Data Tools Project) plug-in, said Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering at Ingres. The bundle also contains source code of a demonstration for developers on how to use Eclipse and Ingres and instructions on getting started with Ingres DTP. The Ingres DTP plug-in features enhancements Ingres made to the Eclipse Data Tools Project so that the development environment is more aware of syntax specific to the open-source database, making it easier to run SQLÂ statements and to debug code. Previously, users had to download the Eclipse framework themselves, find the particular plug-ins they needed, and use the Java Database Connectivity specification to link their Eclipse-based applications to Ingres, McGrattan said. Application developers within Ingres found that process time-consuming, and the company realized its users must also be struggling with the complexity. Ingres already offers bundles for the Python, PHP, and Perl scripting languages with support for Ruby coming next, McGrattan said. Ingres definitely plans bundles of its database with third-party software, notably around BI and application servers, McGrattan said. She sees plenty of opportunities for the vendor to "preplumb" or do the necessary integration legwork for customers between Ingres 2006 and other applications. "There are already projects underway at Ingres to build on top of Project Icebreaker as an appliance solution," she added. Expected to ship shortly, Icebreaker is a tight integration of the Ingres database with a version of rPath's Linux distribution. Ingres would also look to offer bundles based on the other operating systems it supports -- Windows and Unix. McGrattan also commented on recent executive departures. Last month, Dave Dargo, the vendor's chief technology officer, revealed in his blog that he'd left his full-time role at Ingres, while Dev Mukherjee, chief marketing officer is set to leave Friday to join Sears. "The timing was unfortunate," McGrattan said. "But it's no secret we hired Dave off the golf course." Dargo retired from Oracle a few years ago after 15 years with the company, where he headed up the vendor's Linux strategy. "We ran him ragged last year with traveling," McGrattan said, leading to Dargo deciding to step back from his day-to-day duties. He remains a key Ingres evangelist and technical advisor, recently representing the company at an open-source conference at Germany and in several customer interactions. "Dev is a loss for Ingres," McGrattan said, but sheÂ notes Mukherjee is leaving a strong marketing team in place, including former Red Hat and VMware executives. The vendor is also hopeful that Mukherjee's new employer, Sears, might become a future Ingres customer. Ingres is looking for a new CMO but has no plans to hire a new CTO, she added. McGrattan doesn't expect any further upset among the company's executive ranks. "I've been with Ingres since 1989, and I'm not going anywhere," she said. McGrattan's tenure predates both the spin-off of Ingres from CA in 2005 and CA's 1994 acquisition of The ASK Group, which had previously purchased Ingres. Â
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InfoWorld - The Eclipse Foundation will make available Tuesday the 1.0 release of the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) project, featuring tools and frameworks to enhance developer productivity with the PHP scripting language
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An Eclipse IDE plug-in that would provide search capabilities specifically for developers is being readied by a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor.ADVERTISEMENTSBC Case Study: Crate & BarrelWhat sold them on improving their network? A system that could cut management costs from the get-go. Find out more.
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Havard Eide is asking for your help in a new entry to his blog. He's looking for ways to speed up his development in Eclipse, specifically in the debugging.   There is one thing I do need over everything else: remote debugging. Having used Zend Studio for 3 years now it hasn't been the best editor ( I'd rather prefer PHPEclipse/PDT ) but the remote debugging facility is superb [...] Eclipse it has all the tools you need to develop with but the debugging is slow, way too slow!   He's looking for anyone out there that might be able to help him speed up the debugging on his Leopard-installed version of Eclipse ("So slow actually that I had to install Zend Studio 5.5 for whenever I have to debug a file...")
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(InfoWorld) - Don't expect much to be added to Ruby On Rails this year. When David Heinemeier Hansson gives an update on version 2.0 of his Web application framework at its user conference in September, he's as likely to talk about what's coming out as what's going in. The goal is to keep Ruby on Rails fast, lightweight, and easy to use, characteristics that have helped it become a trendy alternative to Sun's Java and Microsoft's .Net and led to a raft of companies offering Rails development services for businesses. "We're going to pull out a fair number of elements, features that aren't a good fit for what people want to do most of the time, and make them plug-ins instead," HeinemeierÂ Hansson said in an interview. "If your application absolutely depends on them, you won't be stranded, you'll be able to get the plug-ins easily." Among the elements to go will be Action Web Service, for creating Web service APIs using SOAP, Heinemeier Hansson said. It's a way of steering developers towards using REST (representational state transfer), his preferred method for linking applications in Rails. "We don't want to turn into Java -- this pack rat that just holds onto any possession. We're not afraid to take out stuff that's not relevant or that we plain don't like," he said. There will be some additions -- the Rails team has some "pent up stuff" in the repository that it's keen to push out, he said. But the focus of Rails 2.0 is to "consolidate and sharpen" what's already there. Keeping the framework light and simple comes at a price, however, and many companies are jumping in to offer Ruby on Rails packages that bundle tools and plug-ins to make the framework more suitable for demanding business needs. Many of those products will be on show at RailsConf 2007 in Berlin in two weeks. Borland Software's CodeGear division is expected to release its Ruby on Rails Java IDE at the show, Heinemeier Hansson said. The product is based on the Eclipse platform and has been in beta since May. Sun will likely give an update on JRuby, an implementation of Ruby for Java environments. The vendor support helps quell jitters among corporate users that Ruby on Rails is not backed by a large company. If the prominent support of Oracle and IBM helped get Linux in the door at big enterprises, the support from Sun and IBM for Rails could do the same. Java and .Net have become "bloatware" as vendors add features for every possible business need, causing companies to look at alternatives, according to Cyndi Mitchell, managing director for ThoughtWorks Studios, which offers software and services for Rails development. The rise of Rails is as much a matter of timing as anything, she said. "This bloatware stuff has just ground to a halt and the alpha geeks are veering away from anything they don't need to get their work done. At the same time, the IT business cycle is picking up, and people are willing to invest again in new things," she said. Her clients are telecom, media, and finance companies looking for a fast turnaround for new applications. Most are deploying in native Ruby environments, but it helps that Sun is supporting JRuby, she said, which lets companies deploy Rails applications on existing Java servers. Jonathan Siegel, founder of Rails consulting company ELC Technologies, said applications that would take eight to 10 months to develop in .Net can be up and running in four to six months using Ruby on Rails. Still, at three years old, Rails is a young platform and has limitations. One high-profile user, the Twitter social networking site, caused a stink earlier this year by complaining that Rails didn't scale well across multiple databases and that the underlying Ruby language is slow. The open-source community responded by developing a plug-in to address the scaling issue. Some also say that both Ruby and Ruby on Rails need a stronger hand to steer them to prevent multiple implementations leading to compatibility issues. "The major risk for the future and longevity of Ruby, and by association Rails, is whether or not the platform gets splintered," Mitchell said. Siegel said: "I believe Ruby on Rails will overcome a key milestone when the deployment teams at larger organizations feel at home with the deployment side of a Rails application. In my view, that's having a deployment procedure that's as easy to maintain and monitor as for a .Net or a J2EE application." Heinemeier Hansson is nonchalant about the demands. He developed Rails for his own use and not to make money, he says, and if enterprises want to use his framework, it is they who should adjust, not he. "We're not trying to bend Ruby on Rails to fit the enterprise, we're encouraging enterprises to bend to Ruby on Rails," he said. "Come if you like it, stay away if you don't."
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Interoperability between Eclipse and .Net should be a Microsoft goal, says Eclipse.
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(InfoWorld) - Dynamic scripting languages, a popular choice for Web application development, will be a top priority for the Eclipse Foundation at the EclipseCon conference, which begins Monday in Santa Clara, Calif. The open source tools organization will update two projects pertaining to AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and it will revise the DLTK (Dynamic Languages Toolkit), which features frameworks and platforms to make it easier to use scripting languages such as Tcl (Tool Command Language), Python, and Ruby. Eclipse's ATF (AJAX Toolkit Framework), with features for editing, compiling, and debugging AJAX applications, is being fitted with support for the script.aculo.us AJAX framework, Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse executive director, said. This will be done with release 0.2 of ATF at the conference. ATF already supports the Dojo, Open Rico, and Zimbra AJAX frameworks. These frameworks enable interactivity in the browser. "The challenge to date around tooling for AJAX has been dealing with these different frameworks," Milinkovich said. Eclipse with ATF can help consolidate the high volume of AJAX frameworks, which has impeded enterprise support for AJAX because of fragmentation, said Jeffrey Hammond, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "There's 130 frameworks out there. What we need is 10 or less," Hammond said. While ATF enables the building of tools to interact with AJAX frameworks, it also features tools of its own, such as those for profiling and debugging. Currently, ATF supports the Firefox browser only, but there are plans to enable it to work with other browsers, including Internet Explorer. Also, Eclipse will debut release 0.1 of RAP (Rich AJAX Platform), which provides a runtime for AJAX applications. Developers can build applications in Java, then decide whether to deploy them in the browser via RAP or on the client. A 1.0 release of RAP is planned for June. "You write your Java [code] once and then you can make your deployment decision later, based on what the customer or what your client wants to do," Hammond said. With the 0.7 release of DLTK, Eclipse will support Tcl. Version 1.0 of DLTK, due in June, will back Ruby and Python. DLTK provides facilities to build IDEs for scripting languages. Eclipse, with its open source tools, enables commercial companies to develop commercial products that leverage base Eclipse technologies.Â
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InfoWorld - Extending its developer outreach, complex event processing software maker StreamBase is making a development environment available as a free plug-in to the Eclipse platform.
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With the flexibility to keep IT and business in close alignment, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the foundation of an agile IT infrastructure. How does the SOA vision make tactical change easier? What are your options for deploying an enterprise SOA now? Who has succeeded and what was achieved? Join this 3-Part webinar series to learn about SOA, understand the requirements for an enterprise service bus (ESB), and understand how customers are benefiting from operational SOAs today.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun is announcing Monday the release of the GlassFish version 2 open-source application server, which features enterprise-level capabilities for running large-scale applications. The company also will offer a beta release of the upcoming open-source NetBeans 6.0 IDE, which accommodates scripting languages. While the first version of GlassFish was intended for developers, the follow-up release due Monday is intended to place GlassFish in the vein of an enterprise-level application server. Highlighted capabilities include clustering, data replication, and centralized administration of server clusters. Improved interoperability between Web services hosted on Java and Microsoft also is featured as part of a Web services stack dubbed "Project Metro." "This is an outgrowth of our relationship with Microsoft," said Ken Drachnik, Sun open-source community marketing manager. The "Open ESB" capability in version 2 enables integration of Web services and existing enterprise resources. Java Business Integration support provides a standardized approach to delivering SOA via Web services, Sun said. Performance also has been dramatically improved with version 2, according to Sun. GlassFish version 2 is based on Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5. Sun will base its own commercially supported application server, Sun Java System Application Server 9.1, on GlassFish version 2. It will feature an approximately 75 percent price reduction to $4,500 for an annual subscription for four sockets. Sun rivals in the application server space, including JBoss and BEA Systems, have participated in the GlassFish development community because they can leverage technologies available in it, such as the application server's JAXB (Java Architecture for XML Binding) technology, Sun officials said. GlassFish version 2's performance was lauded by analyst Joe Niski of the Burton Group. "I think the performance improvements are pretty good," said Niski, who also mentioned the clustering capabilities as worthwhile. "The basic J2EE application servers are getting more and more commoditized. There are so many free ones out there. This provides really commercial-level performance and scalability to basically a free offering," said Niski. GlassFish has served as reference implementation of Java. It also has been integrated with the NetBeans IDE, allowing developers to deploy SOA applications using business process execution language workflows. With NetBeans 6.0, the IDE moves beyond its Java origins to accommodate scripting languages, JavaScript and Ruby in particular. "The Ruby support is very important because it allows us to really talk to an entirely new segment of developers," said Gregg Sporar, NetBeans evangelist at Sun. "We have room inside the tent for more than just Java developers," Sporar said. The Matisse GUI builder in NetBeans 6.0 supports the Swing framework for building desktop applications and Beans Binding for modifying user interface controls to accommodate back-end data source changes. Also, the code editor in 6.0 has been rewritten and optimized. The profiler, for checking performance problems like memory leaks, now enables developers to stop execution of an application so they can examine what is happening within the program. Version 6.0 integrates with the Subversion version control system. General availability for NetBeans 6.0 is planned for the end of this year. The IDE first was offered in an early-access format at the JavaOne conference in May. Future distributions of NetBeans, starting with the production release of version 6.0, will be offered under either the Common Development and Distribution License or the GNU GPL (General Public License) version 2. Extending NetBeans to GPL is expected to make the platform more attractive to Linux developers.
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Delivering the capabilities of traditional EAI products within a light-footprint, standards-based infrastructure supporting incremental integration