Eclipse set to be 'best in years'
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Skywatchers eagerly awaiting Saturday's total lunar eclipse are hoping that the spectacle will be the "best in years".
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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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The eclipse will first be visible, weather permitting, from Japan, Mongolia, China and Siberia on Thursday, October 14. Skywatchers in western Alaska should be able to see the final moments of the eclipse
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Sun Microsystems Inc is courting community views for the next version of Java 2 Standard Edition, the foundation stone of Java scheduled for spring 2006.
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WASHINGTON It&#39;s a global celestial event and scientists say the annual Geminid Meteor Shower is the best astronomy show of the year.
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Roy Ganor-Shwaartz (Team Leader at Zend for the PDT/Zend Studio for Eclipse projects) dropped us a line to let us know that he'll be speaking at this year's EclipseCon (2008).   It seems that PHP developers have attracted much attention from the Eclipse community. In the next EclipseCon conference I am going to make two sessions about PDT and its ecosystem.   His two talks are: Developing Rich Internet Application with Eclipse Tools (Wednesday) and Extending the PDT Project (Tuesday).    EclipseCon 2008 is happening March 17th through the 20th in Santa Clara, California and there's still time to get in on the Early Bird Discount for your registration (through Dec. 31st). Check out the conference schedule for a complete list of speakers.
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A total eclipse of the Moon will occur overnight Wednesday, an event that can turn Earthâs satellite to a colourful shade ranging from deep red to dark brown and sometimes an existential grey.
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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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Will it be the same as last year's top market?
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Interoperability between Eclipse and .Net should be a Microsoft goal, says Eclipse.
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If you didn&#39;t get a chance to see it Wednesday night, you&#39;ll have to wait another four years. People all over world had a chance to see a lunar eclipse Wednesday night.
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Discs offering high-definition images using blue lasers likely will rule the market starting in 2005. By Jonathan Sidener. A pessimist might say that right about the time the last person on the planet buys
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TechWeb - Sun's recent decision to open-source some elements of Java is pretty exciting -- but a few years overdue, says &lt;i&gt;InformationWeek&lt;/i&gt; columnist Eric A. Hall
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The Eclipse section of the Sys-con.com website has posted a review of Zend's latest offering for PHP developers - Zend Studio for Eclipse.   Zend saw that this was a great place to cozy up to and has been developing a professional version of its PDT environment (released earlier this year) for over a year now.  The PDT version is its open source free-ware version of an editor IDE that is based on the Eclipse foundation materials. This article will attempt to introduce you to the Professional version that will be released soon.   They take an overview look first and the install process and what kind of "feel" the interface has. They also dive a little deeper into some of the other aspects of the software like the code editor, the debugger, preferences and the code gallery.
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October&#39;s lunar eclipse is well-placed for North and South America as well as western Europe and Africa. From the United States, the eastern two-thirds of the country will see the entire eclipse (weather permitting).
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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) - 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.