Developers tell Eclipse why it sucks
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Respond to call EclipseCon Eclipse spent today weathering criticism from developers when it dared ask: "What sucks about Eclipse?"â¦
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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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(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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JavaScript development goes to the dogs What you can - and cannot do - with your software is often determined by the code owner's license. From not using open source APIs with closed-source digital rights management (DRM) to being barred from fiddling with Windows source code, we've seen it all.â¦Learn &amp; Contribute, Live &amp; Online - The Register Debates Green Computing
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InfoWorld - Cambridge, Mass. - Eclipse can attribute its success as an open source tools platform to a "secret sauce" enabling multiple organizations to work together, said Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich, in a keynote speech at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference on Thursday.
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Rolling update method deprives Java users of needed  patches, security vendor says.
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While developers are naturally curious over tweaks to the Longhorn road map, many IT administrators barely take notice. Enterprise IT customers typically lag at least
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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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Wants your huddling masses IBM is introducing paid support for users of development tools using Eclipse, while expanding its own products running on the open source framework.â¦
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I have an observation I'd like to disclose about the Open Source community: we tend to leap into all kinds of things before we have all the facts and/or information necessary to make intelligent decisions. We criticize other communities, laugh at things like directory services from the two major NOS players, talk about all our great applications, etc. we hang on to old notions about a what makes Linux tick. Sorry, but that model Eric doesn't fit any more. The community natter appears to come mostly from people who lack deep technical skills and knowledge of enterprises.
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It's not perfect yet, but Eclipse marks a new way of developing applications.
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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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How a simple bug betrays Microsoft's disdain for basic best practice principles
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(InfoWorld) - Cambridge, Mass. - Eclipse can attribute its success as an open source tools platform to a "secret sauce" enabling multiple organizations to work together, said Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich, in a keynote speech at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference on Thursday. The foundation seeks to build "the universal development platform," Milinkovich said. "I think really a big part of the secret sauce of Eclipse is about balance," with participants building shared tools and frameworks and then developing a profitable ecosystem of commercial products on top of the Eclipse platform, Milinkovich said. Unlike the Sun Microsystems-led NetBeans open source platform, Eclipse offers a level playing field for participants, he said. "The real answer of what I want to talk about today is I think Eclipse has discovered, perhaps invented, the secret sauce for getting organizations together that want to build open source. My dream for Eclipse is this becomes an institution that lasts long after I'm gone," Milinkovich said. Eclipse previously has cited downloads well into the tens of millions. Eclipse offers to all participants a Darwinian system of plug-in-based software extensions, with some plug-ins succeeding and others dying off, Milinkovich said. Participants each are on equal footing in the Eclipse process, with features governance, quality, process and predictability, he said. Milinkovich noted the organization has set its sights squarely on Microsoft in the tools arena. "Eclipse has done extremely well in becoming the premier alternative to Microsoft," in terms of size and scope of tools for its platform, said Milinkovich. He presented multiple stages of embracing open source, with the first stage being denial. "Everyone here knows companies that are in denial about the impact that open source is having," said Milinkovich. He stressed he was not speaking just of Microsoft but added lawyers at corporations also have been skeptical. Subsequent stages include a beginning user stage; a collaboration stage, in which a user starts to give back to the community; a champion stage, with more involvement in projects; a strategist stage, in which a business is built around open source, and an aggressive stage, in which participants seek to leverage maximum competitive advantage via open source. Eclipse offers stable release cycles, which boosts the ability of companies to build products on top of the platform, said Milinkovich. In June, the foundation followed this strategy with Callisto, which featured the simultaneous release of 10 different Eclipse technologies. An Eclipse user in the audience shared Milinkovich's enthusiasm, with one reservation. "I love Eclipse, I use it everyday. I think itâs a fantastic tool for development," said William Blinn, software engineer at Tamale, which builds an organizational and collaboration system for financial professionals. Eclipse, Blinn said, "makes everything so easy." However, the Eclipse platform still could use improvement in terms of memory consumption, according to Blinn. "It's kind of heavy in terms of memory," Blinn said. "If you load up the IDE and put a couple of big projects in it, it kind of loads your system up." Eclipse has been successful and now must face the challenge of continuing on this success, said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. "I suppose the larger question is whether the success Eclipse has had so far is going to be continuing and repeatable," Gardner said. For companies with an established business model, an open source model could be a challenge to adapt to, he said. Startups, however, do not face this obstacle, said Gardner, citing Genuitec, which has built a business selling its MyEclipse IDE. Milinkovich briefly joked about conspiracy theories surrounding Eclipse, citing one in which participants are battling "Samurai Burger," which is a code name for Sun. Although Sun invented the Java programming language that has formed a technology basis for Eclipse, Sun has not participated in Eclipse. Sun rival IBM founded Eclipse. Eclipse proponents presenting at the show on Thursday discussed projects slated for June 2007 release. That is when "Europa," which features a coordinated release of multiple Eclipse projects, is due. Europa is the follow-up to Callisto. Details of the next major release of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project were aired. WTP provides tools for developing standards-based, multi-tier Java Web applications. It features tools for HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), JavaScript, XML, Web services and other technologies. Due to be a part of Europa, WTP 2.0 is expected to accommodate Web 2.0 concepts and Java Enterprise Edition 5, according to IBM Rational's Arthur Ryman, who is Eclipse Web Tools lead at the company. WTP 2.0 will incorporate the Eclipse AJAX Tools Framework as well as Eclipse's JavaServer Faces Tools and Dali projects. Dali features tools compliant with the Java Persistence Architecture, for persisting of objects into relational databases. The Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 specification is supported in Dali. Technologies from Eclipse PHP Tools Project, including improved Apache Web server support, and the SOA Tools Platform project, which has improved Web services support, also will be in WTP 2.0. Overlap with the Eclipse Data Tools Project will be eliminated in version 2.0. In the meantime, WTP version 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 are expected in late-September and February as maintenance releases to fix bugs in Callisto. The SOA Tools Platform also is expected to be released in June 2007, although it is likely to be offered separately from Europa, said Iona Distinguished Engineer Oisin Hurley, who is participating in the project. The group developing the platform must first coordinate the various technologies within the platform itself before it moves on to synchronizing it with Europa. The Europa release is to feature no clashing amongst component projects in areas such as naming conventions and versioning, Hurley said.Â Â  "We're trying to make the actual development of SOA simpler," with the SOA project, through integrations of multiple technologies within it, said Hurley. Also, a preview release of the Eclipse Rich AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Platform is expected in a couple of weeks, said Jochen Krause, CEO of Innoopract, and also the lead on the project. The platform features a runtime intended to enable developers to build rich AJAX-enabled Web applications by using the Eclipse development model, plug-ins and a Java-only API. The general release of the platform will be part of Europa, Krause said. Jim Russell, director of App Development Tools for the Lotus Software group at IBM, acknowledged at the conference that the company has an interest in the Ruby programming lanuage but no product plans, at least not at the moment. "We've got some internal projects experimenting with Ruby," Russell said. "It's one of the technologies that people are talking about these days," so IBM is taking a look at it, Russell said.
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Do mobile application developers need to band together to tackle the tough issues facing them? Attendees at Sun's Java Mobile &amp; Embedded Developer Days Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Thursday afternoon will briefly discuss this issue.The idea is that developers must deal with issues such as fragmentation in features, behavior, security policies, and deployment policies and could form an alliance providing a single voice, said Terrence Barr, Sun technical evangelist for the mobile and embedded developer community."We call it the mobile developer alliance and it's essentially a developer activism group," Barr said on Wednesday evening. "It's just a grassroots thing. We haven't thought about it too much. The idea is to bring developers together to give them a common voice and try and work on some of the fragmentation and issues that the industry has."The mobile developer alliance is envisioned as an industrywide effort and not Java-specific. Developers, Barr said, have not had a consistent, uniform voice in facing issues.Among the problems developers face is having to slightly rework applications for each of the many phones, Barr said. Every phone, he said "has certain quirks that you have to deal with, and if you're trying to cover 80, 90 percent of the installed base out there it becomes very painful because you're literally producing hundreds of slightly different versions of the same application," he said.The alliance could serve as sort of a citizens' voice, but the exact mode of operation is still up for discussion, Barr said. Agreement on high-priority issues that developers want to make progress on would be a main focus, as well as trying to establish relationships with players such as carriers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)."It's not necessarily [about] battling your enemies but it's about getting everybody on the same page," said Barr. No single player can address them, he said."At the end of the day, [developers] are the ones who have to make all this stuff work," he said.OEMs care about the platform and carriers care about the networks, said Barr. "The developer has to bring all these pieces together and that's why it's so painful," he said.Sun officials Wednesday also talked about Java ME (Micro Edition) development tools, including plans for a Java ME development toolkit with a consolidated environment for both the CDC (Connected Device Configuration) framework and CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) technology.Also highlighted were enhancements planned for the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit for CDLC. Planned features include an application testing framework and support for Java Specification Request (JSR) 256 - Mobile Sensor API Submission to the JCP (Java Community Process) and JSR 280 - XML API for Java ME.The application testing framework is intended to automate manual testing. It will support refined testing scenarios in an emulated environment as well as improvements for testing of applications for users with visual, motor, or dexterity impairments.JSR 256 offers a unified way of managing sensors connected to mobile devices and easy access to sensor data. JSR 280 is designed to provide a general-purpose XML API for next-generation mobile devices.
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Michael Kimsal has posted some more thoughts on what he calls the "sad state of PHP development" pointing out some of the practices of the PHP group surrounding the development of the language.   Every few months there's a release, whether large or small, which introduces new features and bug fixes. However, with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason other than someone with commit access decided they liked the 'new' way better than the old way.   He points out a specific example, get_object_vars and how its return values were changed in an earlier release as well as the update to glob made recently to change its return types.    In his opinion:   No changes should be made to the PHP core without an issue being opened, either in the 'bug' tracker or some other issues tracker.   Be sure to check out the comments for other great opinions on the topic.
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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 PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is commonly used for building Web applications. With PDT, Eclipse is providing technology that can be used as is by developers or serve as the basis for value-added products manufactured by tools vendors. "The idea of it is to have a very good PHP editor, a debugger," and PHP inspection, said Yossi Leon, a leader of the PDT project and a product manager at Zend Technologies, which makes PHP-based tools. Features of PDT 1.0 include: * Context-sensitive editors offering capabilities like syntax highlighting, code assist and cold-folding. * Integration with the Eclipse project model, enabling inspection using File and Project Outline Views and a PHP Explorer View. * Incremental debugging of PHP code. * Frameworks and APIs for extending PDT to build PHP-oriented developer tools. PDT can use different plug-ins that will work with the Eclipse IDE to add functionality. Examples of these capabilities include ftp support, source code control, and database connectivity. Zend does not see its own products competing with Eclipse PDT and plans to build a product based on PDT. "We found that PDT is more of a framework to build products based on this, so it provides a very good editor and good debugging, but there is much to complete beyond that," Leon said. PDT is not an IDE and does not provide out-of-the-box profiling or remote debugging, said Leon. But an early user of PDT said he planned to eventually replace the Zend Studio PHP IDE with the Eclipse offering. "I think it's great," said Peter MacIntyre, president of software developer Paladin Solutions. "It's got a lot of features," like code folding and syntax highlighting, MacIntyre said. PDT has Eclipse plug-ins like a report generator that cannot be used with Zend Studio, MacIntyre said. But he added he would be interested in the Zend product that builds on top of PDT. Zend's commercial PDT product will add functionality and certify plug-ins to add additional capabilities, such as source code control and database connectivity. PHP has advantages over Java in ease of use, MacIntyre said. "It's very easy to learn," he said. Eclipse's PDT project adds PHP to the list of languages supported by Eclipse, which also backs Java, C, C++, and Ruby. "This really takes us into this large community of PHP developers," said Ian Skerrett, Eclipse marketing director. PDT was not part of the multi-project Eclipse Europa release in late-June because it was not ready yet. There have been 300,000 downloads of the preview version of PDT since the beginning of 2007.