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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Nice blog post via Slava  criticizing the quality of the Java runtime and hotspot compiler:  "The HotSpot source code is a bad joke We wasted an afternoon and had a good laugh on IRC today, looking over parts of the SCSL sources to HotSpot and the sun.* classes. I can't give too much detail or paste code samples because that would violate Sun's ... license, but here are some highlights:"  This is my favorite one:  "A lot of preprocessors are used. This includes a mix of awk, sed, shell scripts, and indeed, Scheme! Yes, the JVM source includes jscheme.jar, used to generate some CORBA classes. Considering that Sun talks about how bad preprocessors are, its hypocritical of them to use preproces ...
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Hype hangover The Eclipse Foundation's plan to push ahead with a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) run-time framework later this year marks an interesting change of direction for the industry group.â¦
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Can it deliver on its promises? Comment Service oriented architectures, or SOAs, have been positioned as the great leap forwards in how IT will finally come to be the major facilitator to the business.â¦
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'Filthy rich internet applications' Sun has given the world a (slightly) better idea of what's on the way from client-side Java.â¦
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Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).   The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time.  This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.   The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.
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Patrick Chanezon sayz :  "I got some pretty good feedback after my post Java Syndication Babel: let's paint the picture together!, mainly from the Rojo/Feedparser team."  ...  "Then the Rojo/Feedparser team, Brad Neuberg and Kevin Burton posted some good comments. I agree with Kevin that we don't necessarily need a JSR and should start collaborating now. From Kevin and Brad it seems like what we should work on first is defining a common set of Unit Tests, and a way to get a DOM-Rome-like API on top of their SAX-like API."  So check out the list  and the wiki .  Hopefully we'll be able to collaborate and make some forward progress.  I'm sure everyone will benefit.  The more I think about a ne ...
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Interoperability between Eclipse and .Net should be a Microsoft goal, says Eclipse.
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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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Delivering the capabilities of traditional EAI products within a light-footprint, standards-based infrastructure supporting incremental integration
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(InfoWorld) - BEA jumped ahead of the pack last week, announcing the industryâs first native SOA platform, SOA 360. But the company left enough unanswered questions about the new platform to prompt one analyst to say thereâs still much explaining to do. SOA 360 spans three BEA product families: Tuxedo, WebLogic, and AquaLogic and providesÂ  a âunifying methodologyâ for modeling, creating, developing, and deploying an SOA application using all of BEAâs SOA products, said Rob Levy, executive vice president and CTO of BEA. SOA 360 features a collaborative tooling environment, called WorkSpace 360, and a common software architecture, dubbed mSA (microServices Architecture), that is based on SOA and the concept of a services network. âI think the industry is looking for an approach to SOA that is different,âÂ  CEO Alfred Chuang said, noting that BEA wants to approach SOA with a process, not just a product. WorkSpace 360 allows users with different roles â such as business analyst, enterprise architect, and developer â to collaborate. mSA is an event-driven architecture that uses notification services to publish and discover modular components or âmicroServices.â mSA will use industry protocols and standards such as OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative), SOAP, WSDL, XML Schema, WS-Security, and SAML and will deliver backplane components, application frameworks, as well as activity, presentation, and infrastructure services. BEA wants all its products to use mSA by the end of 2008. BEA revealed in March that it would make its WebLogic Server application server modular. The company now believes this approach can work for all its products, said Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA tools unit. âModularization will be a key design point for us, and ultimately [mSA] will have an effect across all of our products,â Roth said. But Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis, found BEAâs presentations âvagueâ about details such as what makes something mSA-enabled.Â  âThereâs just too many unanswered questions right now,â Willett 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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Andrew Johnstone has posted some of his experience he's had developing with one of Zend's latest offerings - Zend Neon. Neon is the Zend project to bring robust PHP development functionality to the community on top of the Eclipse platform.   I've been using Zend Studio for Eclipse (beta) for several weeks in a rewrite of a framework and numerous sites at work and overall I really like the IDE. Its got some great features and being based on the eclipse project makes it really extensible and customizable.   He happy overall with the IDE but has come across some bugs in his time developing in it (nine of them) with issues ranging from the SVN functionality and samba out to small syntax sorts of things (like the auto-formatting).
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(InfoWorld) - The Eclipse Foundation has established itself as a premier open source software tools project. The organization has gained support from vendors ranging from IBM (which helped found Eclipse in 2001) to Borland Software, BEA Systems, and seemingly every other major player in the software industry except Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. The EclipseWorld 2006 show in Cambridge, Mass. last week afforded those using Eclipse technologies a chance to get updated on the latest developments at Eclipse. InfoWorld Editor-at-Large Paul Krill attended and interviewed Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse executive director, about the state of Eclipse and subjects ranging from dynamic languages to rivalries with Sun and Microsoft. Â  InfoWorld: Where is Eclipse headed and what new technologies are on the horizon? Mike Milinkovich: Thatâs a open-ended question. When I look at the broad initiatives that are going on within Eclipse, a couple of things come to mind. First is continued growth and adoption around our Rich Client Platform, and thatâs something that we expect to see continued emphasis on. Weâre seeing more projects joining Eclipse around extending RCP in various areas, so thatâs good news for RCP. And as we talked about in our press release earlier this week, weâre very pleasantly surprised about the growing adoption and awareness of RCP. A couple of other things in just sort of broad terms [include] more support for multiple languages. Eclipse has always been focused on being a platform for the development of language environments, and weâre seeing some really interesting new developments, some of them within Eclipse and some of them in commercial products. In the commercial products space, Adobe is in the process of building and releasing its Flex Builder 2.0, which is an Eclipse-based development environment for ActionScript, which is their language for the Flex servers. And within Eclipse, in the next quarter weâre planning on having the first release from the PHP IDE project, which we think is really exciting. PHP [Hypertext Preprocessor] is a really important language both for enterprise development but [also for] Web development in general, and having Eclipse tooling available for PHP is something that weâre pretty excited about. IW: That leads right into my next question. Do you see more support for dynamic programming languages? You have PHP, you have the AJAX projects. Do you see more for some of the other languages that are out there? Ruby, Perl, Python? MM: Well, yes. Within the Eclipse ecosystem you can find Eclipse plug-ins and tooling for virtually every single dynamic language you can think of. Thereâs Eclipse tools for Ruby, RadRails is a project... These are not projects at Eclipse, but theyâre open source projects which are based on Eclipseâ¦ RadRails is an open source project based on Eclipse for building an IDE for Rails, which is the Ruby framework. And you have PyDev for Python, which is a fairly popular. This is another example of a plug-in, which is available from an open source project outside of Eclipse but is based on Eclipseâ¦. For virtually every dynamic language you can imagine, you can find Eclipse plug-ins to help enable development for it. And that really resonates back with what we were talking about previously about Eclipse being a platform for building development tools. Thatâs really the fundamental mission of the Eclipse platform. So within Eclipse, as I mentioned, we have the PHP tools. We also have the AJAX Toolkit Framework, and so this provides sort of added compiled debug for JavaScripts running inside the browser, so it provides an AJAX developer a very nice development environment for use with Firefox in building AJAX applications. And thereâs quite a few different AJAX frameworks out there, and it supports Dojo, Open-Rico and Zimbra currently, and I think theyâre definitely planning on adding more in the futureâ¦ And again, lastly I would mention the Rich AJAX Platform, which is a new project just getting started at Eclipse for providing an AJAX runtime thatâs based on the Eclipse component model for developers who want to use that style of development for building AJAX applications. IW: Which leads to my next question: Do you think thereâs kind of an overlap in some Eclipse projects? You have the Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform, thereâs also an AJAX Toolkit Framework. I know for the time being you have data tools in the Web tools Platform Project, you also have a separate Data Tools Platform Project. Do you think thereâs a lot of overlap going on or is it just based on which vendor proposes which project without too much thought given to consolidation? MW: Itâs a little bit of both. So within Eclipse as an open source community, we are willing to tolerate some overlap; let the projects work things out over time. And so far thatâs actually worked out pretty successfully. In the particular examples that you just raised, I donât see overlap. The AJAX Toolkit Framework and the Rich AJAX Platform, they donât overlap. Theyâre two very different things. The first one, ATF, is focused on the needs of developers looking for tools for building AJAX applications. And the second one, RAP, is a runtime environment, a runtime framework, for building AJAX applications. And on the other example, with Web tools and data tools projects, initially there was some overlap, but thatâs actually probably almost a poster child for project cooperation at Eclipse, because as data tools came to be and started to work, the Web tools guys moved their data connection layer and adopted the technology coming from data tools. IW: Is Eclipse de-emphasizing Java and refocusing on some of the other languages that we talked about? Is it focusing on some of the scripting languages as well as on .Net while de-emphasizing Java? MM: I wouldnât say weâre de-emphasizing Java. As Eclipse is growing and thereâs more projects joining the fold, there are more resources to take on more languages and more platforms. Now, almost every Eclipse project writes its code in Java. 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: There's been some talk in the industry that Java is kind of yesterdayâs technology. Sun wouldnât like to hear that, but do you see it that way at all? MM: I kind of frankly take that stuff with a grain of salt. You know, thereâs this constant hype machine within the high-tech industry that the next shiny new thing is going to be the grand vision thatâs going to do everything that has never been done before. What my observation is, is that Java is now getting to the point where itâs clearly mature enough and stable enough to meet the needs of mainstream enterprise development and I think thatâs a good thing. Maturity isnât something to be ashamed of. Itâs something that the people that are talking about the shiny new things should treat with respect. IW: I guess thereâs kind of a trend toward putting the virtual machine on other languages. MM: Yes, and I think thatâs a great idea. Well, I think what youâre saying is thereâs a trend toward opening up the JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) to make it easier to support other languages. And I think thatâs a great idea. IW: Why? MM: Because the programmers want more than one language, but thereâs so much work and talent thatâs been invested in the runtime infrastructure thatâs part of the Java platform, that reinventing all of that technology for another language doesnât make any sense. You want to have a particular problem, which can be expressed more easily in a language other than Java, thatâs great. But you donât want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I mean you still want to be able to use this highly-tuned and mature runtime platform from companies like BEA and IBM and JBoss and Oracle that have spent years perfecting this middleware infrastructure for Web applications. You donât want to throw that out just because you want [to] program in another language. IW: How much money would you estimate is being generated by Eclipse-based software or is it still the main attraction to Eclipse is itâs all free? MM: 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 in terms of sizing that market. Unfortunately we havenât been able to get an analyst to actually spend the time to quantify those 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 or market 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: Whatâs going on with Eclipse as far as application lifecycle management? Some of thatâs on the agenda here, but could you maybe give a synopsis of whatâs going on there? MM: Sure. Thereâs several different projects going on at Eclipse in the area. Serena is leading a project called ALF, Application Lifecycle Framework, and Compuware is leading a project called Corona. And these are both projects that are in fairly early days, theyâre both in incubation. But application lifecycle management is an area where we see definite growth at Eclipse, but itâs going to take some time for these projects to mature and really hit their stride. IW: Whatâs the difference between Corona and ALF? MM: ALF is really focused on providing the technology for choreographing tools across multiple developers, and Corona is more focused on making it easier to integrate tools within a single workbench environment or within a single desktop environment. [There are subtle differences], but there actually are important differences for developers. IW: Like what? MM: You ask this every time we talk. [I am] just trying to think of a way to make it really simple to explain. I mean think if it as ALF is focused on choreographing tool integration across a whole team. Corona is more focused on making it easier for one developer in his particular environment to do his job. IW: This next question is about something you mentioned -- I guess it must have been last year -- at a conference in San Francisco. You talked about how you donât really need salespeople anymore. And I just met with a company (Genuitec) thatâs basing its technology on Eclipse and they donât have any 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? Do you see anything happening there? MM: I think that over time things are changing. What youâre really talking about is what is the channel by which people acquire software? Thereâs multiple ways you can acquire software. You can download it and use it, whether itâs for free or for purchase. You can buy it packaged or you can deal with a direct sales force and deal with people. Historically, enterprise software has been sold through the direct sales force channel, and I do believe over time, weâre starting to see success in open source software products in areas that have been traditionally the realm of the direct sales force. Iâm thinking of things like SugarCRM and Compiere and open source products like this. And those environments or those products have very, very low cost of sales, so as customers get more used to that, to being successful with that kind of software acquisition, I think that over time, yes, thereâs going to be fewer and fewer software salesmen. IW: Hereâs the standard question that I kind of usually ask last. Is anything going on as far as Sun joining Eclipse or merging NetBeans and Eclipse? MM: Nope, absolutely not. IW: No talks in the last year, two years? MM: I bump into (Sun executive) Simon Phipps at conferences and have a drink with him once in a whileâ¦. IW: There was one Java project that I guess Sun was working on with Eclipse. MM: There was a Sun committer working on -- it was actually on the base Eclipse platform to enable it for Solaris x86, as I recall correctly. So it was getting Eclipse running on one of their operating system platforms. IW: But thereâs no further movement since then? MW: No. And [in the] conversations Iâve had with Sun, theyâve made it pretty clear that theyâre not really interested in doing anything other than continuing to push their NetBeans 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: They seem to say differently. MM: Oh, good for them. I 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: 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. Itâs been wonderful to see the development community embrace Eclipse the way it has over the last five years. IW: Is there anything else you wanted to mention? MM: Actually I just want to probably just close with reinforcing about RCP. To date, Eclipse has always been very much focused on tooling and being a tools platform, but what weâre I think really seeing now is RCP, Rich Client Platform, becoming a very important runtime infrastructure for application developers and ISVs who want to build multi-platform applications running on the desktop. And I think thatâs a very important niche for Eclipse and something that we expect to see continuing to grow.SEE ALSO:Eclipse chief talks up projects, awaits Sun and Microsoft
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(InfoWorld) - Santa Clara, Calif. -- Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich criticized Microsoft on Tuesday for not approaching Eclipse about interoperability between .Net and open source Eclipse technologies. Speaking at the EclipseCon conference, Milinkovich also shined a spotlight on OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative), which provides the basis of Eclipse's core plug-in model for software development. Commenting on Microsoft, Milinkovich said Microsoft sends representatives to EclipseCon every year. Eclipse and Microsoft officials in attendance then agree that a meeting ought to be set up between the two sides. But afterward, "they never call," Milinkovich said. "Ask your friends at Microsoft what they're doing to interoperate with Eclipse," Milinkovich said during a press conference. Milinkovich said he expects Microsoft to someday join Eclipse and that there are enough points of interaction between these two development "universes" that interoperability is the right thing to do. Currently, there are a few point solutions for interoperability, such as Teamprise providing an Eclipse plug-in enabling Eclipse-based developers to access Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server product for application lifecycle management, Milinkovich said. (Teamprise announced on Tuesday that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation.) But users would benefit from cooperation between the two camps to provide interoperability, Milinkovich said. A company with, for example, developers building in .Net and on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform might want to see resulting applications be easily interoperable, he said. Microsoft, contacted for its response to Milinkovich's plea, declined to comment. But an industry analyst questioned whether Microsoft really needs to do anything about interoperating with Eclipse. "I think there's a lot of people that make a very good living bridging the two [platforms] and SOA makes that less of an issue," said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. With SOA, the use of mashups and services boosts interoperability, according to Gardner. Eclipse technologies based on OSGi could become the open source alternative to .Net for software development, Milinkovich said. Eclipse began basing its technology on the OSGi component standard with the Eclipse 3.0 platform in 2004. "OSGi I believe is going to be one of those overnight successes that endures eight years or nine years in the making," Milinkovich said. "Itâs a component model for Java and this is something that Java actually has been lacking since its inception," Milinkovich said. The OSGi community is participating in Java Specification Request 291, which would have OSGi become part of the Java component model, Milinkovich said. "One of the great things about [OSGi] is it's supported by a number of vendors and open source communities. Eclipse is not the only implementation of OSGi," Milinkovich said. The universal component model provided by OSGi is being used in embedded devices, rich client applications, and server applications, with support from organizations such as NASA, technology vendors such as IBM and Oracle, and open source communities such as Apache and Spring, Eclipse said. The OSGi Developer Conference is happening concurrently with EclipseCon this week. Also at Eclipse on Tuesday, Milinkovich noted a new project proposal called Maya, which is being led by Cisco and is intended to make it easier to deploy Eclipse and Eclipse Rich Client Platform solutions within large enterprises. Another goal of Maya is making the deployment and update process transparent to end users. Milinkovich also said Eclipse plans its simultaneous release of multiple projects, called Europa, in June. Europa will feature the Eclipse 3.3 platform and 22 projects, including the latest versions of technologies such as the Data Tools Platform, Web Tools Platform and Business Intelligence, and Reporting Tools projects. Last June, Eclipse did its Callisto release as the predecessor to Europa, but that only had 10 projects.
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Aaron Wormus has a new note on his blog today about his presentation at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and another speaker he's excited to hear.    One of the Zend conference sessions that I'm pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe's (of WSO2) "Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP".   I'll be presenting a session on "Moving to PHP5 with Style." This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.    Aaron's talk fits under the banner of the "PHP Development" talks, including others on topics like hosting PHP applications on Windows, working with PDO, unicoding in PHP6, and using PHPUnit.
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Eclipse PHP Development tools project invites scripters to Eclipse, poses changes for Zend Technologies.
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InfoWorld - In recent months, the&#160;acquisition of SOA player webMethods&#160;has been the dominant news coming out of Software AG, but the middleware company also continues to hone its mainframe software and strategy.