Eclipse executive chides Microsoft on interoperability
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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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Microsoft and Sun Microsystems say they are warming up to each other, but it will take more time to deliver on the grand promises of platform interoperability announced last spring.
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Interoperability is the great challenge facing the open-source movement.
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(InfoWorld) - Ever wondered why Microsoft software needs continually to be patched and updated? Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie believes it's because software development is still more an art than a science. Mundie was speaking on one of his first foreign trips since taking over the technology strategy and policy roles from iconic company founder Bill Gates, at a press briefing in Brussels late Monday billed as a glance into the future of the technology industry. Expect as many fundamental changes in technology as we have seen over the past 20 years to occur in the next five to 10 years, he said. We are entering a multidevice environment where mobile phones get smart, and people will demand both integration and segregation of their various computing devices, he said. Web services will become vital in this new age and Microsoft "will have to master how to use the Internet and components of the net for software services," Mundie said. But isn't Microsoft racing too fast into this brave new world when its core product, the Windows operating system, can't even function properly without having to be patched up and updated constantly? he was asked. "The problem is that software development is an important endeavor but it has not matured as an engineering process, it's still an art form," Mundie replied. "As the scale of software grows, so does its complexity. Software has to find, in the next five to 10 years, a simultaneous solution to complexity and concurrent (parallel) problems," he added. How does Microsoft feel about having to follow Google's leadÂ in the new environment where Web services play such a central role in mapping the future direction of technology development? Claims that Microsoft has lost its leading position are exaggerated, he replied, just as they were in 1994-95, when Netscape was seen as the next great thing in information technology. Does Microsoft plan to do to Google what it did to Netscape? (Netscape was eclipsed when Microsoft attached its own Web browser, Internet Explorer, to Windows, sparking anÂ antitrust battleÂ with the U.S. department of Justice.) "I hope so," Mundie replied. Antitrust is one policy area that doesn't fall under his remit and he declined to comment on theÂ ongoing disputeÂ with competition regulators including the European Commission. However, he couldn't resist the opportunity to disparage the work of Europe's top antitrust officials. "There is no country, including the European Union and every other part of the European Commission (other than its competition department), that doesn't see Microsoft as an important player in the broad economic realm," he said. He added that the company's ongoing antitrust problems in Europe have not hampered its efforts to influence policy. "I've never felt that people are shunning our involvement because of that dispute," he said. Mundie was in Brussels to give a keynote speech at a conference on European venture capitalism, hosted by Microsoft. During his visit to the European capital he said he met with the staff of European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, as well as civil servants in the information society department of the Commission -- not quite the top level meetings enjoyed by Gates on his occasional visits to Brussels in recent years.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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(InfoWorld) - The Eclipse Foundation, with an open source technology release on Monday, hopes to alleviate developers of clutter. Eclipse Mylar 1.0 is a task-focused user interface that reduces information overload and makes it easier to multitask, according to Eclipse. Mylar addresses a fundamental problem: that IDEs have made it easy to browse large systems with thousands or millions of lines of source code but they present too much data, said Mik Kersten, the project lead for Mylar. "They overload developers with so much information," Kersten said. "[Developers] can often spend more time looking for the information they need by browsing and searching than they actually spend programming," Kersten said. Accessible here, Mylar enables developers to focus on specific jobs at hand by bringing a task list view into the Eclipse IDE. Developers indicate which tasks they are working on and Mylar monitors all programming activities to create a task context featuring all information relevant to that task. Contexts can be shared with other developers. Mylarâs name was derived from the plastic film used to prevent blindness when viewing an eclipse. In the case of Eclipse's Mylar, "it prevents information blindness when staring at the Eclipse IDE," Kersten said. "This integrates across the entire Eclipse IDE," Kersten said. The task management facility is called a task-focused user interface. Also incorporated into Mylar is access to issue trackers such as Bugzilla. By integrating issue-tracking into the IDE, developers no longer have to toggle back and forth between browser and e-mail client to use an issue tracker. Developers also can work with Bugzilla reports offline and then reconnect afterward. Additionally, developers can be summoned to immediately work on a task that can show up in their task list. Mylar's context filtering and task management drew praises from analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk. Task-filtering is automated, as opposed to it being manually done before, he said. "When I've used Eclipse in the past, you can manually create a focus that filters out everything. But with Mylar, it can automatically create that focus for you, so it's less work on your part to create the focus," Cote said. "Because it's done programmatically, it can get a better sense of things that are related that you may not think of." But Mylar's freely available innovation could encroach on commercial products, Cote said. "I think this is the start of something that could do that, certainly," he said. "There's always encroachment with Eclipse," Cote said. Rational with its Jazz project offers technology similar to Mylar but on a much larger scale, Cote said, but Mylar could be expanded with capabilities now offered commercially. Mylar in its first version is developer-focused while other technologies in the space have capabilities such as application lifecycle management, Cote said. Mylar can be embedded into existing commercial products, Kersten said. It solves the problem of developers having to cope with multiple task managers that offer an inconsistent experience, he added. Third parties also can innovate on top of Mylar. Vendors including CollabNet and Borland are committed to using Mylar, he said.
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Blog: General managers for interoperability at Microsoft argue that a boosted commitment to interoperability, as well as legal arrangements, are behind Microsoft deals with Linux vendors.
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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.
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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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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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Microsoft and Sun may be going steady, but they aren&#39;t quite sure where the relationship is headed. The companies gave an update on Wednesday to their &quot;ongoing dialogue&quot; about product interoperability that
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TechWeb - Eclipse is central in IBM's strategy to compete with Microsoft's Visual Studio.net. Both packages offer the ability for developers to plug multiple toolsets into shared environments.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the Windows application platform is to be fitted with "Fluent UI" ribbon capabilities now offered in Office 2007.The ribbon UI presents a new interface in Office 2007. "We usability-tested it massively, and fortunatel, it has had a very strong positive reaction," Gates said during a keynote presentation the 2008 Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif. "We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent UI quite a bit across a number of applications," he said. "It turns out it's a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality."The Fluent UI represented "a major risk that Microsoft took," Gates said. But the older interface with its dropdown menus was hiding so much functionality that the company was being asked for features that were already there but were concealed, he said.At the conference, Microsoft is promoting Office as a development platform with users able to write extensions. During Gates's presentation, third party applications were shown that extended Office with custom development, such as the MindJet MindManager planning application and FedEx's QuickShip for processing FedEx shipments from within Microsoft Outlook.During a subsequent question-and-answer session with the audience, Gates was asked to compare and contrast opportunities for developers working with platforms like Microsoft's with platforms like open source. Gates responded, "Our platform is a commercial platform where customers expect a very high level of service, a very high level of integration, but the nice thing about it is they are willing to pay for software."Free software has always been around, he said. "We've always had free software out there, it's not really a new thing. In fact, I'd say in some ways it's less of a factor than it's ever been," Gates said.Everyone has the same business model, he said: Software developers have free versions of their software, inexpensive software, and robust commercial versions of their software. "The commercial environment, I think, will always be the pre-eminent thing in terms of providing business productivity," said Gates.He advised those who want to develop free software to be careful which licensing model they choose and to select an option that does not restrict commercial versions of their software.Asked about Yahoo, which has rejected Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition offer, Gates said the question was whether Yahoo should be a media company or focus on engineering. In an ad model, scale is needed, he said. Yahoo's engineering could be combined with what Microsoft has done, he said.Gates's overall presentation did not impress one attendee, who nonetheless was impressed with Gates himself."Bill is definitely a visionary, and he's one of the greatest men in the 20th century, but I have to wonder how much of that was just reading from a script," said Aaron Alanen, senior consultant at Sogeti."I did see in his questions later on that he really had some deeper knowledge," Alanen said.During Gates's presentation, he also played a tongue-in-cheek video about what he would do during his upcoming semi-retirement from Microsoft. Included were possibilities such as getting into politics, joining the rock band U2, and becoming a rapper or actor. Guests featured in the video included, among others, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bono from U2, and George Clooney.
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How a simple bug betrays Microsoft's disdain for basic best practice principles
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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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Even as such open source software developers as Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) and OpenOffice.org wax enthusiastic concerning enterprise deployments of their respective Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Office alternatives, industry analysts are urging caution.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Rational on Thursday is announcing plans to provide technical support for the Eclipse open source tools platform, thus giving customers a single point of contact for both open source and IBM's commercial technologies for software development. IBM will also unveil plans for upcoming tools geared to the new Eclipse 3.2 platform, and it is rolling out online developer resources for Eclipse users. IBM is making the announcements at the EclipseWorld conference in Cambridge, Mass. Through its IBM Rational Elite Support for Eclipse program, IBM will for the first time provide support for raw Eclipse tooling, said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy at IBM Rational. Tools also will be provided. IBM previously supported IBM Rational products that are based on Eclipse but not for Eclipse tools themselves. Users will be assisted with issues such as solving defects and getting questions answered. IBM Rational, rather than the IBM Global Services group will provide support. "This is an opportunity for the IT managers and development managers to provide a unified support structure," Hebner said. Eclipse users not working with IBM Rational products also can sign up for the Eclipse support. IBM officials noted users are doing mission-critical work and want more accountability for support rather than just relying on the community at large. "They're happy with the level of tooling [from Eclipse]. They're not happy with building [solutions] alone," said Gary Cernosek, offerings manager for analysis, design and construction at IBM Rational. Eclipse 3.2 features Java 5 support, refactoring and a preview of support for the Windows Vista OS. Version 3.2 debuted in July. IBM also will support some Eclipse projects, such as the Web Tools Platform, Test and Performance Tools Platform, and the Eclipse Modeling Framework. With its support effort, IBM is addressing the downside that enterprises face when opting to develop with free, open source tools. according to analyst Bola Rotibi, of Ovum. "The problem many customers have or many enterprises have is not so much from that point of view [of using open source tools], it's when things go wrong," Rotibi said. "IBM is basically saying, well, OK, we understand this issue and [you need] a unified support approach or a unified support framework," Rotibi said. The support program costs $400 per developer for a one-year subscription for unlimited calling. Support will be available in the fourth quarter of this year. IBM at the show also is announcing a preregistration effort for participating in beta programs for three upcoming products based on Eclipse 3.2. These products are Lotus Designer 6, which is a rapid application development tool to build components to run WebSphere Portal 6.0; IBM Rational Software Architect Release 7, for UML (Unified Modeling Language) modeling, and IBM Rational Functional Tester 7, for automated testing. Tools improve the ability to visually construct services for SOA. Enhanced support for geographically distributed development also is a highlight. Rational Software Architect also features modeling for code reconciliation and Functional Tester can be used to test services, business processes and SAP applications. IBM's new tools ship by the end of the year. New resources on IBM's developerWorks site are in the Eclipse and Rational skill zones. These resources help developers build skills in Eclipse 3.2 and include a course on building "cheat sheets" Eclipse 3.2, for performing complex Eclipse tasks. Education, tutorials and resources are featured for Eclipse 3.2.
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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.