Eclipse executive chides Microsoft on interoperability
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Interoperability between Eclipse and .Net should be a Microsoft goal, says Eclipse.
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Windows alternative An open source, cross-platform desktop architecture from Eclipse is enjoying a surge of interest among developers according to an Evans Data Corp poll.â¦
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Exec's comments come after Sun decides to release Java code under the less-controversal version 2 of the General Public License.
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Enhancements to Eclipse-based IDE are designed to bring traditional source code and testing tools to hosted Force.com platform.
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Composite applications require user interface work in native language, company says.
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The Microsoft chief executive warns Linux sellers that open-source "is not free."
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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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Microsoft executives said they are working hard to finish up its&#160;Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office Project 2007, an update that some users have been waiting for before deploying the most recent version of the software.SP1 will update Project Professional 2007, Project Server 2007 and Project Portfolio Server 2007, said Keshav Puttaswamy, group program manager at Microsoft, speaking during the Microsoft Office Project Conference in Seattle on Monday.It will primarily fix bugs and improve stability and performance, said Mike Angiulo, general manager of the Microsoft Project business unit. It will also enhance some cache features, he said.While the conference might have been an ideal venue for announcing the release date for SP1, executives said they&#39;ll wait another two or three weeks before disclosing that information.Office Project 2007, the most recent version of the project management software, became&#160;available earlier this year. But as with other new Microsoft software, some customers have been waiting for SP1 before deploying it.Christopher Ludlow, director of project management at Amylin Pharmaceuticals, in San Diego, said he is waiting for SP1 before migrating to Project 2007. The system integrator he works with advised him to hold off because their experience was that Project 2007 is glitchy and unstable, he said.If SP1 fixes those issues, he&#39;s interested in some of the new features of Project 2007, including a reported improved network responsiveness that may mean he doesn&#39;t have to rely on Citrix for remote access.Microsoft executives touted some other new features in Project 2007 at the conference. One of the most important updates in Project 2007 is that it can support many more users than it could previously, said Angiulo. Technology consulting firm EDS has one of the biggest deployments of Project 2003, with 8,000 users, he said. &quot;They were driving the limit of what you could get out of it,&quot; he said.Microsoft and EDS put together a scalability lab to test volume users of Project 2007. They supported 40,000 users, he said. EDS has a goal of growing to 60,000 users.Angiulo also promoted the integration of Project with other Microsoft software, such as Outlook and Excel. Because many businesses use Office software, that integration sounds helpful to Ludlow.But some of the integration is forced, which is turning other businesses away. Jan Tervonen, vice president of technology at Seattle medical technology company MRS, currently supports Project 2003. She started the upgrade to 2007 but backed out when she learned that it required the newest version of SharePoint. She wasn&#39;t ready for that upgrade yet.On Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is scheduled to address the conference, and he&#39;s expected to describe future planned enhancements to Project, including deeper integration with Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. In addition, future versions of Project will support earlier stage projects that aren&#39;t yet fully defined, he&#39;ll say. Those features are part of an overall strategy at Microsoft to try to expand the use of Project beyond project managers, he&#39;s expected to say.
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There is a fascinating article on Groklaw called Searching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is "So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer."  There is also the Novell comment, "Only Novell has Microsoftâs endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."
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New graphical report designer plug-in gives Eclipse developers direct access to world's most widely-used open source BI reporting product  SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 20, 2006 Ã¢â¬â JasperSoft Corporation, the market leader in open source business intelligence, today launched iReport Plug-in for Eclipse, a graphical report designer that lets developers using Eclipse quickly add sophisticated reports to their applications. JasperSoft's new Eclipse plug-in, as well as the iReport designer application and the JasperReports reporting libraries are all freely available for download and use under open source licenses. This is the first integration of Eclipse with JasperSoft's open source BI products, which have been downloaded more than 1.7 million times.  Eclipse users can now create, edit, and run reports from the same familiar development environment they use everyday, speeding up their workflow and reducing project development times. Java developers can instantly access the iReport graphical report editor to give their applications rich reporting capability based on the popular and powerful JasperReports library that can create Web and pixel-perfect ready to print reports in PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV, TXT and XML. In addition to easy report creation, the new iReport Plug-in for Eclipse also gives developers access to the entire JasperIntelligence suite of open source BI applications to manage interactive reports from a server, schedule reports, and analyze data.  Ã¢â¬ÅWe want to thank JasperSoft and their peers in the open source community who worked on the new iReport Plug-in for Eclipse that gives developers the ability to add advanced reporting capability to their applications,Ã¢â¬Â said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. Ã¢â¬ÅCreating a bridge between the Eclipse and JasperSoft open source communities further strengthens both communities and brings more value to users of open source applications.Ã¢â¬Â  Ã¢â¬ÅJasperSoft developed the iReport Plug-in for Eclipse in response to demand from Java developers to get direct access to the world's most popular open source reporting library with the most popular open source IDE platform,Ã¢â¬Â said Giulio Toffoli, lead committer for the iReport project and iReport engineering lead at JasperSoft. Ã¢â¬ÅNow Java developers can choose the best reporting tools for their projects, without concern about IDE compatibility.Ã¢â¬Â    The new product is shipping with all copies of iReport and is immediately available for download and installation from http://www.jasperforge.org as part of the iReport package. iReport and the new Eclipse plug-in are distributed under the GPL open source license.  ###
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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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You will comply The European Commission has warned Microsoft it could face further penalties over what it calls "unreasonable pricing" of interoperability information.â¦
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InfoWorld - Cambridge, Mass. -- IBM and other parties are set to propose an open source systems management initiative for consideration by the Eclipse Foundation, with managing SOA a goal of the plan, an IBM official said at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference on Friday.
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InfoWorld - 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.
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Attendees at the Microsoft 2008 Office System Developer Conference this week are leveraging development capabilities in Office System, but cite issues such as getting used to the new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the 2007 Office release.A sampling of attendees at the San Jose, Calif. event revealed mostly satisfaction with Office System. Most were Microsoft business partners developing applications for Microsoft's SharePoint platform for collaboration and business processes."I bought into it. I'm drinking the KoolAid," said Jeff Modzel, technical architect for SunGard Higher Education."Our customers are colleges and universities and their constituents, which are students. Kids very much want collaborative environments for their classes. SharePoint's an easy solution to that problem," Modzel said.He described Office System as an "excellent" development platform, although he noted difficulties in writing an Excel 2007 add-in prior to getting the newly released Visual Studio 2008 platform.The new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the Office package takes some getting used to, Modzel said. "The first handful of times I used it, I did not like it and the more I used it the more I liked it," he said.Consultants at developer OTB Solutions also mentioned issues with the ribbon. The people who hate it the most are the people who are very familiar with the old Office platform, said Dick Federle, consultant at OTB.? But he still likes the feature. "The neat thing about the ribbon is since it?s context-sensitive, you're only seeing what's important for what you're looking at, at the time, said Federle.Another consultant at OTB gave the ribbon a thumbs-up. "It's become familiar. You can use it and extend it," said OTB consultant Jen Glass.OTB has been using SharePoint as an application development platform. "We saw with the new SharePoint platform that it was actually ready for enterprise applications," Federle said. For example, OTB has developed a health insurance claims auditing system that processes more than 1.5 million transactions a month, he said.Developers, though, must adapt to using configuration capabilities in SharePoint rather than resort to coding, Federle said. "There are a lot of capabilities and a lot of problems you can solve with SharePoint through configuration without having to write any code," he said.At FirstBank, the company is currently running Office XP and is looking to migrate to Visual Studio Tools for Office and Office 2007, said Greg Mestas, distributed applications manager at the company.While features such as the ribbon UI in Office 2007 may make things easier for developers, Mestas is not so sure what the benefit is for end users."Most of our people use Word and Excel, and Word and Excel are still Word and Excel," Mestas said. "They've had a lot of the same features release over release. So the biggest benefit for us [in migrating] is staying on a supported platform, to put it bluntly," he said.The bank is starting a pilot project on SharePoint for office automation. "We're trying to get rid of all that paper and all that manual process and create some workflows and InfoPath forms as a replacement," Mestas said.An official at SharePoint applications developer Consejo applauded Microsoft's Open XML document initiative as a benefit for Office application development."Their whole Open XML is proving to be very comforting to most developers because in the old days, when it was binary, that not necessarily ideal," said Virgil Pate, development manager at Consejo.Also, the ribbon UI makes it simpler to modify the user interface, he said. But Microsoft could have done a better job in migrating users to the ribbon, Pate stressed.Recalling his company's experience with SharePoint, Pate said it is easy to get started developing extensions, but support has been slow, he said.Pate expressed caution about the Office Live platform, in which Microsoft offers online versions of software. While calling Office Live a great idea, Pate wondered about its security and reliability. "If they ever start to go down or start to have lag time, it's going to hurt them," he said.Another developer, Marcin Geborik, of developer Computer Plus of Krakow, Poland, cited good experiences in developing for SharePoint but found difficulty in working with Microsoft Office Project Server."As a matter of fact, Project Server's API is just not good," Geborik said.Meanwhile, Microsoft with version 2 of Office Live Small Business this week restructured the offering, providing users with a free domain for the first year as well as a free Web site. After the first year, the domain costs $14.95.?Subscribers get 100 free e-mail accounts each with 2-2.5GB of storage, as well as services such as contact management.Also, Microsoft with its Unified Communications platform plans to bulk it up with instant messaging capabilities that can find persons linked in a workflow chain.
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Sun backs an EU standards push for interoperability between office software. Microsoft says it's already there.
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Microsoft Corp. has appointed an executive to lead its controversial efforts to make its software more interoperable with Novell Inc.&#39;s Suse Linux.