Eclipse exec: Platform upgrade a blank slate
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(InfoWorld) - Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation for open source developer tools, is a frequent interview subject at InfoWorld. Given the popularity of Eclipse and its having attracted just about every major computer technology company, perhaps frequent updates from Milinkovich are appropriate. InfoWorld editor at large Paul Krill met with Milinkovich at the EclipseCon 2007 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., last week to get perspectives on Eclipse and issues such as the recent open-sourcing of Java. IW: We talked this morning for a few minutes about the theoretical Eclipse 4.0 platform.Â  What do you think might be in that? Youâre already covering about 80 different technology areas, so whatâs left to add to it and what might you expand on in Eclipse 4.0? (The current release of Eclipse Platform is version 3.2.) Milinkovich: The idea of doing an Eclipse 4.0 is mostly focused on the platform, so itâs not so much about expanding the coverage of Eclipse, as you put it. Itâs about the core technology that those 80 different projects build on top of. And frankly, at this point, I donât know, weâre really just starting the conversation about what the community thinks would be useful additions. IW: What constitutes the core platform? Milinkovich: Currently, the Eclipse project consists of a number of different frameworks, but they can be basically grouped into four different areas.Â  Thereâs Equinox, which is the basic core runtime for Eclipse. Thereâs the tools platform, which is the basic infrastructure for building Eclipse-based tools. Thereâs the JDT, or the Java Development Tools project, which is the Java IDE that most people think of when they think of Eclipse. And then finally, thereâs the PDE, the Plug-in Development Environment, which is the tool that you use for creating Eclipse plug-ins. IW: Where do you think you might go with the platform? Do you want to make it more scalable and add more languages? What do you think might end up in there? Milinkovich: I donât know. IW: When might there be an Eclipse 4.0?Â  I think you said not for a couple years. Milinkovich: Yes, not for a couple years. This is the very beginning of the conversation. The first question is, does the Eclipse community even think that doing a 4.0 would be a good idea? So these are very, very early days, and itâs very exploratory at this point. IW: Do you think it is a good idea? Milinkovich: I think probably, yes. On balance, itâs a good idea. IW: Why? Milinkovich: Because you donât want to be stagnant. You want to make sure that youâre evolving your platform. In any software project, itâs important to make sure that youâre constantly working to keep the technology fresh and current. But we need to get feedback from the community before we make any decisions. (Editor's note: At an EclipseCon session held after this interview, attendees suggested a multitude of improvements for Eclipse 4.0. A blog on that session can be accessed here.) IW: Eclipse has been around since 2001 and was broken off into its own organization in 2004. What would you say is the value of the economy around Eclipse? How many products are being sold based on Eclipse? Milinkovich: Let me preface this by saying that these are my somewhat informed guesses. We donât have hard numbers on a lot of these different things. But in terms of the number of products that are built on Eclipse, itâs clearly in the hundreds if not, perhaps, even in the low thousands. In the embedded space alone there are probably hundreds of products. I have a Google Alert for Eclipse embedded, and Iâm constantly getting bombarded by new products in that space. In terms of the overall dollar value, I donât really know, but Iâm pretty confident that itâs well over $1 billion, in terms of the size of the entire ecosystem. And Iâd love to find somebody whoâs willing to do a free study to give us better numbers. IW: You mentioned this morning that Eclipse may become as big with runtimes as it has been with tools. Could you talk about that? Milinkovich: This is really around taking the Eclipse platform, which is this OSGi-based (Open Services Gateway initiative) plug-in model, and starting to see people build applications with it rather than simply tools. If you go back to Eclipse 3.0, thatâs the first release, this was in 2004. That was the first release was shipped, [featuring] the Rich Client Platform. The first Eclipse runtime at that point was on the desktop. Since then, weâve had the embedded Rich Client Platform Project to bring that technology to devices, and we have several different projects at Eclipse that are bringing the same technology to the server. So we see a lot of growth and a lot of interest in leveraging this technology in applications and in products. And I think Oracleâs announcement this morning is a great example of the building of momentum around this idea. IW: The Oracle TopLink announcement? Milinkovich: Yes, the Eclipse Persistence Project. IW: The two big holdouts from joining Eclipse are Sun Microsoft and Microsoft. We discussed Microsoft this morning, as you know. Do you see those two companies eventually joining Eclipse? Milinkovich: Well, first of all, the door is always open. Weâd love to have them. There havenât been any recent discussions with either group, so I donât think thereâs any change with either company. I think the one thing thatâs happened recently is Eclipse joined the Java Community Process. But there hasnât been any interest in Sun participating in Eclipse that Iâm aware of. IW: Also this morning we discussed OSGi. Could you just reiterate the importance of OSGi to Eclipse? Milinkovich: OSGi is the open standard that we base the Eclipse runtime on top of. So Eclipse Equinox, for example, is an implementation of the OSGi specification, and it is the heart of everything that we do at Eclipse. One of the things about Eclipse [that] makes it a little bit unique is that we have an architectural constant that goes through all the projects at Eclipse. Everything we do at Eclipse is about building plug-ins, which are effectively OSGi bundles, and so thereâs this very strong link between everything we do at Eclipse and fostering greater adoption of the OSGi specifications. Basically everything we do at Eclipse is extending and growing the OSGi community. IW: What is the purpose of the OSGi developer conference thatâs happening concurrent with this one? Milinkovich: There are so many interrelationships between the two groups, and thereâs so much interest within the Eclipse community about OSGi. We decided that there was going to be enough overlap in content that it would make sense to have them come here, and they were definitely interested in doing that. IW: I think I read that there about 1,300 attendees at EclipseCon. Milinkovich: Yes. IW: I've been looking at attendee badges. It seems like most of them are from different commercial software vendors. Is that the makeup of most of the attendees here? Milinkovich: The demographic, if you will, for EclipseCon is developers either working on the Eclipse platform or using the Eclipse platform to build products. And so that is probably the bulk of the badges youâll see here at EclipseCon. IW: What are the goals for your organization in the next year or so? Do you expect to just complete some of the projects or continue with a lot of the projects youâre going for? Milinkovich: We are an open source community, so itâs about the code. And so the goals for our organization this year are primarily around taking the projects that are just getting started and making sure that they get their first releases out the door, and [with] the projects that are more established, making sure that they continue to grow their group of adopters and make sure that they continue to build product-ready technologyÂ  The big event every year at Eclipse is when we ship our annual release train, and this year the Eclipse Europe release train going out in June has currently 22 projects. IW: And thatâs about providing unified releases of everything at the same time? Milinkovich: Itâs not a single large software release. Itâs 22 Eclipse projects shipping on the same day. And thatâs still very valuable to the Eclipse community because they have been at least somewhat tested in terms of their ability to load up into the same workbench and work together, but the primary reason why we do it is so that commercial adopters of the technology can have all of the projects that they need to build their products. IW: Do you think the concept of open source has reduced or raised revenues for software companies? Iâve had it mentioned to me that open source reduces revenues for everybody. Milinkovich: On the whole, I would say that open source has been a very large benefit for software companies and the software industry as a whole. Yes, for any one particular company you can say their revenue went down. But for every company like that you can find other companies whose revenue has gone up. People have made some very large businesses around open source. So I think that itâs been a good thing for the industry. It allows people to build more innovative products because they can focus on their differentiating value, the thing that matters to their customers, and spend less time building the infrastructure underneath them. I think itâs actually accelerated the rate of innovation within the software industry. And the other thing Iâd point out is that there are a number of very large companies whose business model would basically not work without open source. IW: What companies would those be? Milinkovich: Google would be a good example. The software costs alone of outfitting however many thousands of servers Google has would be astronomical if they didnât have the ability to create an open source stack to run on those machines. So I think thatâs probably the best example, or the most obvious example. IW: Whatâs Eclipseâs take on the open sourcing of Java? Milinkovich: I think it was a good move. Itâs good for Java to become part of the mainstream of open source development. One of the knocks against Java for the last couple of years has been because it was a proprietary technology, that it was not something that many free software and open source people were interested in using. [Free Software Foundation President] Richard Stallman wrote the "Java Trap" article, for example. By making it open source, it brings it into a broader community and reinvigorates the ecosystem around it, and it hopefully will attract even more developers and greater innovation.
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REDMOND, Wash. -- Help is on the way for developers struggling with using the Visual Studio 2005 development platform with Windows Vista, a Microsoft official stressed at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference here on Tuesday.During a question-and-answer panel session, an audience member characterized the experience of using Visual Studio 2005 with Vista as "miserable." He wondered if the upcoming Visual Studio 2008 upgrade would be an improvement."Is the '08 experience on Vista likely to be better?" the questioner asked. Also known as Orcas, Visual Studio 2008 is due by the end of this year."It unequivocally is better," responded Dino Chiesa, Microsoft director of the .Net Framework. He advised the audience member to download the Orcas beta release and see the difference."We tried to be transparent about that, that Orcas was the Visual Studio release that was built to target Vista," Chiesa said.Other improvements also are awaited in Orcas, such as an improved build system in Visual Studio Team System for continuous integration."The performance and scalability of Team System is way enhanced," said Chiesa.But another audience member took issue with the use of templates in Orcas, saying distribution of templates was ad hoc. Chiesa responded there are some improvements in the general release with regard to templates.In a related issue raised during the session, Microsoft's J.R. Arredondo, senior product manager for Microsoft Office, said the company sees its Popfly technology, for quick creation of applications such as mashups and widgets, as a model for the future. The Office business application strategy at its core is about bringing simplicity and usability to the masses, Arredondo said.Another audience member, apparently a Microsoft business partner, asked how he would be able to sell Microsoft's BizTalk Server integration software with the company making available related technologies in the operating system and .Net Framework such as Windows Communication Framework and Windows Workflow.But Microsoft's Sam Guckenheimer, group product manager, countered that while he is passionate about capabilities for developers, users still would need a server platform for functions such as deploying an application across multiple farms.
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Migrating to the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 distribution can cause things to break if youre not aware of the changes. Here are the four major new categories of upgrades you'll need to plan for.
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XPlanner is a web-based project planning and tracking tool for eXtreme Programming (XP) teams. XPlanner is implemented using Java, JSP, and Struts, and MySQL (user contributed support for other databases). XPlanner 0.6.2 provide many improvements and bug fixes including sortable tables, object ID quick queries, improved page printing (image-based progress bars), improved interfaces (history, role editing, time entry, iterations, and developer/customer tasks), dynamic attribute support for enhanced SOAP integration, and contributed functionality for NTLM authentication and WackoWiki-compatible text formatting.  You can find the latest release here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=49017&package_id=42226
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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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Does Ubuntu point the way to the real future for desktop Linux?
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From Carlo on the FCHouse.com blog, there's this new guide to debugging your PHP5 application with the Eclipse PDT functionality in an OS X environment.   In these months I have developed in PHP with Eclipse PDT (Php Development Tool). During the first days I tried to make the debugging works, but without great results, therefore I dropped and I took back the usual debugging technique of every good script developer: echo $variableName; or simply logging everything possible in some log files.   Knowing that this wasn't "the right way" to do things, Carlo searched for something better. He found a hint on another blog and ultimately figured out how to get his Eclipse/Apache/XDebug installation to work on his Mac. His post also includes the "glue" that you'll need to get them all working happily together.
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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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Sun Microsystems Inc. Thursday announced the availability of the J2SE (Java 2 Platform Standard Edition) 5.0, which the company said looks to be the most significant Java upgrade to date.
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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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Sun is working on technology to make it easier to run different languages on the Java Virtual Machine. Called the Da Vinci Machine, the project is being described by Sun as "a multi-language renaissance for the Java Virtual Machine architecture." The project features prototype JVM extensions to run non-Java languages efficiently as well as architectural support.Although many languages besides Java have been implemented on the JVM, including Ruby, the intent is to make the JVM more compatible with other languages, said Charles Nutter, core developer of JRuby, which is a version of Ruby to run on the JVM. "For the most part, almost every language that's more than five years old has some kind of implementation on the JVM," he said. ?The JVM allows programs using it to run on any platform supporting the JVM; it provides hardware and OS independence. Benefits like flexible online code loading and online garbage collection, in which objects are moved out of the way automatically rather than having to be saved manually, are featured.Da Vinci Machine is intended to overcome obstacles like mismatches between a source language's design patterns and JVM capabilities. Because the JVM was designed for Java and Java favors some design patterns over others, implementers can find themselves dealing with these mismatches, Sun said."Specifically, the JVM was originally for Java, and many other languages have features unlike what Java provides. We need to find ways to support those features," said Nutter.Some pain points to running new languages on the JVM include limitations on calling sequences and control stack management, finite inheritance, and scaling problems when generating classes.Nutter pointed out that Java, in being a statically typed language, differs from scripting languages like Ruby, which are dynamically typed. Thus, Java gives the JVM more clues about what code is going to be executed. Ways need to be found to let the JVM make the correct call for these languages, he said. In JRuby, this obstacle is addressed via a piece of code to inspect target operations.Capabilities of Da Vinci Machine are planned for inclusion in the upcoming JDK (Java SE Development Kit) 7, which is based on Java Platform, Standard Edition 7. Sun could not provide a release date for JDK 7. It is not known how many Da Vinci features might actually get into JDK 7, Nutter said.Da Vinci represents an experimental branch, or even a fork, of the JVM, said Nutter. He cautioned that fork in this case is not meant to carry the same negative connotations associated with forking of a platform.Java developers questioned liked the idea of Da Vinci Machine."[Da Vinci Machine] sounds like something I was thinking was going to happen and should have happened," said Daniel Hinojosa, an independent Java developer and a founder of the Albuquerque Java Users Group. "I think there's going to be a race between Java and the Microsoft [CLR (Common Language Runtime)]." The CLR has been likened to a virtual machine supporting multiple languages. "I think Java's a great language, but I think people like to program differently, whether it's a functional language or a scripting language," he said. Hinojosa said has been running JRuby, Groovy, and Java on the JVM.Developer Alex Miller, tech lead at Java clustering technology vendor Terracotta, also agreed with the Da Vinci Machine effort."There are lots of people writing and running dynamic languages on the JVM these days, and there are certain things that are complicated or obscure with the use of [dynamic] languages," Miller said.A lot of dynamic languages differ from Java in that they leverage functions rather than objects, Miller said. Making them work on the JVM requires extra work, he said.Sun's JRuby project, meanwhile, is getting an upgrade. Version 1.1, due within a month, features a full compiler to greatly improve performance, Nutter said.
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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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Sun Microsystems today released Java 2 Platform Standard Edition J2SE 5.0, code named project Tiger. Version 6.0 of the programming framework, codenamed Mustang, has entered the development stage and is expected
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I was reading LWN where there were reports of security holes in a dozen different packages based off Mozilla's Gecko. Someone complained about the lack of a universal library that they should all use so that users would only need to update the library and not each program separately. Apparently such a library exists as libxul, but its use is uncommon enough that the bugs were reported as being for the several separate programs and not for "libxul".
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Sun has issued a refreshed beta build of Solaris Express 10. Build 69, Beta 7 is an incremental update that reaches several milestones. The bits flesh out Sun's Predicative Self-Healing initiative with the Service Management Facility, replace Gnome 2.0 with Sun's own Java Desktop Release 3, and bundle new tools to help debugging.
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buildbot-0.7.5 is now available. The BuildBot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. It builds and tests the tree each time a change is committed, providing status updates through a web page or other protocols. Please visit http://buildbot.sf.net for more details.   This release features new support for Monotone and Tinderbox, and adds an SVN repository poller, new BuildSteps to transfer files between master and slave, and multi-owner Locks. Builder reconfiguration is now far less destructive than before, and the useful portions of the logfile are displayed as output of the reconfig/restart command. All buildsteps have been renamed and reorganized, and of course a number of bugs have been fixed.
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(InfoWorld) - Borland Software this week is rolling out an upgrade to its Together enterprise modeling tool for the Eclipse platform, featuring SOA capabilities. Borland Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 boosts its usefulness for SOA by enabling a UML-based (Unified Modeling Language) view of dependencies in an entire system. This lets developers understand where services are being invoked and helps them gauge the impact of changes, said Dave Hauck, director of marketing for Together technologies at Borland. Also featured is support for the Eclipse 3.2 platform and C++ projects and integration with the company's requirements definition package. Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 plugs into the Eclipse shell. Eclipse 3.2 supports the Java 5 specification, which features generics, Hauck said. With C++ backing, models and code in C++ applications are synchronized automatically when developers make changes to diagrams or code. This synchronization is based on Borland's LiveSource technology. "Software architects and developers benefit from our LiveSource technology because we automate this source code level to UML abstraction automatically," Hauck said in an e-mail. Design patterns and source code metrics in the new Together product help a C++ developer create better code. Integration with the Borland RDM (Requirements & Definition Management) solution, comprising Borland CalibreRM and CalibreDefineIT, allows developers, architects, and analysts to build systems based on requirements gathered during an analysis phase, Hauck said. Borland sees itself competing with IBM Rational and Telelogic. But those vendors do not have UML modeling, data modeling, and business-process modeling integrated into a single tool, Hauck said. BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) capabilities have been improved in the new product, enabling the import of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services). Also further compliance with the BPMN specification and diagram improvements are included. Model-Driven Architecture capabilities have been bolstered, as well, with the product offering enhanced transformation authoring, XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) transformation types and examples for getting started. Model and code quality assurance functions have been improved, too. Borland Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 is $3,500 per user. It ships Sept. 8. Below are the fields to populate the Chart.