Actuate Joins Eclipse, Starts Open-Source BI Project
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Ziff Davis - After joining the Eclipse Foundation, the company launches a project to create open-source business intelligence and reporting tools.
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The ActiveBPEL(R) engine is a Business Process Management (BPM) runtime environment for executing process definitions created to the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) 1.1 and WS-BPEL 2.0 specifications. It is written in Java and   Active Endpoints today announced the availability of Milestone 1 of ActiveBPELÃÂ® Community Edition 5.0 Server. ActiveBPEL 5.0 represents the worldÃ¢â¬â¢s first release of an open-source implementation of both BPEL4People and WS-Human Task. These specifications allow human interactions to be included in services-based applications. By incorporating human tasks in composite applications, WS-Human Task and BPEL4People expand project teamsÃ¢â¬â¢ flexibility and efficiency in delivering standards-based solutions.  Features and availability Milestone 1 of ActiveBPEL Community Edition 5.0 Server is available for download at http://www.active-endpoints.com/active-bpel-engine-overview.htm In addition to containing BPEL4People and WS-Human Task, ActiveBPEL Community Edition 5.0 Server provides comprehensive support of the BPEL 1.1 specification and the WS-BPEL 2.0 standard. The server supports the full complement of BPEL activities including event handling, exception handling and scope/compensation management. The ActiveBPEL Community Edition 5.0 Server also includes advanced capabilities such as deployment packaging, process persistence, event notifications and console APIs. Developers and others interested in gaining early experience with the standards-based systems for creating services-based applications are invited to download the Milestone 1 release as an introduction to the full capabilities of a visual orchestration system.
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A new Seattle start-up called SourceLabs seeks to solve a longstanding problem with the popular open-source software movement: Components often don't talk with each other.
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Red Hat and Exadel today unveiled a partnership aimed at bringing Eclipse-based developer tools to Red Hat's JBoss middleware.
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Ingres is making it simpler for Eclipse developers to build Java applications to run on its open-source database.
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InfoWorld - Ingres began offering a software bundle on Wednesday&#160;to make it easier for developers to build Eclipse-based applications on top of the Ingres 2006 open-source database.
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Sun is getting into the open-source business with Solaris, but will this automatically translate into better sales?
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com. Open-source company JBoss Inc. on Monday introduced a workflow engine that broadens the company&#39;s middleware stack. JBPM 2.0 was developed with the open-source project of the same name and joins
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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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IBM is hoping to provide commercial-level technical support to developers building applications using Eclipse open-source tools.
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InfoWorld - Computer Associates on Monday announced it has joined the Eclipse Foundation for open source developer tools.
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(InfoWorld) - The Eclipse Foundationâs Eclipse World 2006 made its way to Cambridge, Mass., in early September, with foundation executives touting the success of the open source application development project in attracting developer interest and support from big-name players such as IBM. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill caught up with The foundationâs Executive Director Mike Milinkovich to talk about the organizationâs accomplishments, competition with Microsoft and Sun, respecting Java and the road ahead. InfoWorld: How much money would you estimate is being generated by Eclipse-based software, or is the main attraction to Eclipse still that itâs all free? Mike Milinkovich: I wish we actually had good numbers on trying to estimate the size of the Eclipse ecosystem. Iâm quite confident that itâs in the billion-dollar range and probably more, but we just donât have the hard numbers. But what you said about the attraction to Eclipse being free -- the economics of the Eclipse model is a little bit different than that, because the Eclipse community as a whole is almost uniquely focused on enabling a commercially profitable ecosystem around the free platform. So yes, we do provide open source tools and frameworks from Eclipse, and those are provided for free. But we definitely are motivated across the Eclipse ecosystem to see people and companies make money from the Eclipse platform. IW: I just met with a company thatâs basing its technology on Eclipse, and it has no salespeople. Do you see that as a trend where software companies, particularly open source software companies, donât have salespeople because they donât see the need? MM: Historically enterprise software has been sold through [a] direct salesforce channel. I do believe over time, weâre starting to see success in open source software products in areas which have been traditionally the realm of the direct sales force. Iâm thinking of things like Sugar CRM and CompiereÂ  [ERP] and open source products like this. Those environments or those products have very, very low cost of sales, so as customers get more used to that, I think that over time, yeah, there are going to be fewer and fewer software salesmen. IW: Is anything going on as far as Sun joining Eclipse or merging NetBeans and Eclipse? MM: Nope, absolutely not. Theyâve made it pretty clear that theyâre not really interested in doing anything other than continuing to push their NetBean strategy. IW: What do you think of their being two kind of rival camps? Is it good for competition? MM: Well weâre certainly not shy of competition, and frankly weâre winning. IW: Sun seemsÂ  to say differently. MM: Oh, good for them. Iâve got the numbers, they donât. IW: Who do you see as your main rival, NetBeans or Windows .Net? MM: We clearly and have always felt that Eclipse is about enabling competition with Microsoft. IW: And how have you fared there? MM: Actually, we started five years ago, and I would say that starting from zero the growth of Eclipse over the past five years has been absolutely phenomenal. IW: Is Eclipse de-emphasizing Java and refocusing on some of the other languages that we talked about? Some of the scripting languages as well as .Net? MM: I wouldnât say weâre de-emphasizing Java. As Eclipse is growing and thereâs more projects joining the folds, thereâs more resources to take on more languages and more platforms. Now almost every Eclipse project writes its code in Java. So weâre clearly heavy users of Java. But in terms of Java being the only platform or language that we support within Eclipse, thatâs never been the vision for Eclipse. Itâs always been about supporting as many languages and as many platforms as we can find people willing to work on projects for. IW: Where is Eclipse headed and what new technologies are on the horizon? MM: A couple of things come to mind. First is continued growth and adoption around our Rich Client Platform (RCP). More support for multiple languages. Within Eclipse, in the next quarter weâre planning on having the first release from the PHP IDE project, which we think is really exciting. Because PHP is a really important language both for enterprise development, but Web development in general, and having Eclipse tooling available for PHP is something that weâre pretty excited about.
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A safe bet? Comment I met with Gerry Cohen last week, the founder CEO of BI vendor Information Builders (IB). After 30 years in the business he still has an infectious enthusiasm for software. As has Jim Goodnight, the founder CEO of SAS, and Michael Saylor, the founder CEO of MicroStrategy, who founded his company in 1989. Between them, this triumvirate of founder CEOs account for $2.3bn of worldwide annual BI industry sales: about one-third of the whole BI market.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - The open-source community doesn't always deliver software that customers want, according to Rob Levy, executive vice president and chief technology officer of BEA Systems Inc. "The community builds what it thinks is good, but it is not always the same as what the customer thinks is good,â Levy said this week in Bangalore, India, where he visited BEA's R&D (research and development) center. The Apache Tomcat servlet container, for example, is not strong on management, because management features weren't seen as very important by the community, although BEA customers wanted it, Levy said. So BEA had to build a Tomcat management console for its WebLogic Java server platform, he said. BEA has adopted what it calls a "blended strategy" on open source. It has put products in open source, to take advantage of the innovation that comes from community development, and also supports open-source technologies like Spring and Hibernate on its own products, Levy said. BEA announced earlier this year that it will put in open source a significant portion of BEA Kodo, its persistence engine, under the name Open JPA. BEA acquired Kodo after purchasing SolarMetric Inc. last November. Open JPA is a set of Java persistence APIs (application programming interfaces) that are based on the Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 (EJB 3) standard. "We pushed Kodo out in open source and we now have 2,000 people working on it, as against 50 people when we bought the company," Levy said. But there are other products that BEA will not release as open source so that it can retain full control over their development, Levy said. "The reality of life, specially businesses, is that you have to be a good corporate citizen, you want to know where a piece of code came from, because if you donât control it, how do you know there is nothing malicious in it," he added. BEA has bet the farm on SOA (service-oriented architecture) because it will be fundamental to the way businesses are run, Levy said. Industry and users can easily get taken in by the hype that SOA is going to halve IT costs, Levy said. There are some cost savings in deploying SOA, but the technology's real benefit is the agility and competitive advantage it gives companies to think up and add business services quickly, he added. Without SOA, adding a service involved a time-consuming process to integrate it with the company's existing services, Levy said. With SOA, a company can add a service without making any system changes, Levy said. Deploying SOA will also free company resources to focus on business processes, rather than the underlying IT infrastructure. "If you look at the total effort that is being used from business needs to applications and production, today it is very skewed towards IT," Levy said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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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. Borland Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 boosts its usefulness for SOA by enabling a UML-based (Unified Modeling Language) view of dependencies in an entire system. This lets developers understand where services are being invoked and helps them gauge the impact of changes, said Dave Hauck, director of marketing for Together technologies at Borland. Also featured is support for the Eclipse 3.2 platform and C++ projects and integration with the company's requirements definition package. Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 plugs into the Eclipse shell. Eclipse 3.2 supports the Java 5 specification, which features generics, Hauck said. With C++ backing, models and code in C++ applications are synchronized automatically when developers make changes to diagrams or code. This synchronization is based on Borland's LiveSource technology. "Software architects and developers benefit from our LiveSource technology because we automate this source code level to UML abstraction automatically," Hauck said in an e-mail. Design patterns and source code metrics in the new Together product help a C++ developer create better code. Integration with the Borland RDM (Requirements & Definition Management) solution, comprising Borland CalibreRM and CalibreDefineIT, allows developers, architects, and analysts to build systems based on requirements gathered during an analysis phase, Hauck said. Borland sees itself competing with IBM Rational and Telelogic. But those vendors do not have UML modeling, data modeling, and business-process modeling integrated into a single tool, Hauck said. BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) capabilities have been improved in the new product, enabling the import of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services). Also further compliance with the BPMN specification and diagram improvements are included. Model-Driven Architecture capabilities have been bolstered, as well, with the product offering enhanced transformation authoring, XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) transformation types and examples for getting started. Model and code quality assurance functions have been improved, too. Borland Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 is $3,500 per user. It ships Sept. 8. Below are the fields to populate the Chart.
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Open-source backers plan to launch a "census" project next year that would allow companies -- using a tool devised by OpenLogic -- to figure out how extensively they use open-source software.
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The Eclipse Foundation will debut technologies from 21 open-source projects simultaneously.