Eclipse Pulsar Gains Momentum with Mobile Industry Leaders

The Eclipse Foundation today announced a new release of Eclipse Pulsar, an application development tools platform for mobile developers. The new release extends support to the Ericsson and Sony Ericsson developer communities.

Pulsar is the result of collaboration among leaders in the mobile industry to provide a common set of Eclipse-based tools in a single packaged distribution that supports multiple software development kits (SDKs). With Pulsar, developers can use a single, familiar development environment to create mobile applications that target different devices. With today's release, Pulsar now supports SDKs from Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson and Sony Ericsson.

"Ericsson is a longtime Eclipse member, and participating in the Pulsar initiative aligns with our business goals," said Roland Svensson, Vice President, Portfolio Management and Technology at Ericsson. "We believe Pulsar has the potential to make it easier for mobile developers to gain access to the tools and SDKs they require."

Stefan Qelthin, Head of SW Environment for Sony Ericsson, also noted: "Pulsar brings together a common tools platform that allows participating handset makers to focus on providing value added tools for their developer communities. Sony Ericsson is pleased to be part of this industry initiative and hope it will help fuel a broader ecosystem of mobile apps and opportunities for the developer."

Members of the Pulsar initiative aim to work across four key areas:

• The creation of the packaged distribution called Eclipse Pulsar Platform;
• A technical roadmap to advance the capabilities of the platform;
• A set of best practices which includes documentation and test suites; and
• Education and outreach to drive adoption of Pulsar with mobile application developers.

"Pulsar is delivering on its promise to streamline the development of mobile applications, arguably the hottest growth area in the mobile market today," noted Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation. "Pulsar is also a great example of how Eclipse continues to be a platform for collaboration. We are pleased that Ericsson and Sony Ericsson have joined Motorola and Nokia in Pulsar, and look forward to their contributions to making Pulsar a truly definitive mobile application development tools platform."

CA Leverages Eclipse for Universal GUI

CA has released a new Eclipse-based GUI that it says makes it easier to test and debug applications on the mainframe. The new GUI, released today, maintains all the features from the green screen, and it helps developers reuse existing mainframe application code to speed development time. The GUI is the main update in new versions of CA's InterTest for CICS, a tester for IBM’s CICS Transaction Server, and CA's InterTest Batch, which debugs applications written in COBOL and PL/I. CA InterTest for CICS now lets users add listings to their PROTSYM storage files, while CA InterTest Batch testers can map storage to a DSECT format specification section.

Eclipse has greatly matured from its early, much slower days.

The recent 3.5 release of Eclipse, code-named Galileo, brings loads of new features that will help developers become even more productive

In this review, I evaluate the new Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment), but there have been changes made to the entire Eclipse platform, as well.

During my tests of the IDE, I did not run into any problems. Eclipse has greatly matured from its early, much slower days. Today, "powerful" and "feature-rich" are apt descriptions of the platform.

In fact, this release has more features than I could hope to include in any one review. Here, then, are the biggest:

* Full support for both OS X Cocoa and Solaris x86. (And, believe it or not, support for the ancient IBM s390 mainframe—why, I don't know.)

* Alternative button order. Yes, you read that right, and, yes, it really is important. Different operating systems order their OK and Cancel buttons differently, and it's significant that Eclipse allows you to configure your preference.

* Enhancements to the way tool bars and menus can be customized, including the ability to show and hide individual menu and tool bar items.

* Multiple instances of the Properties box. This is a good one, because you can open up more than one Properties boxes so you can simultaneously inspect and modify the properties of multiple objects. (I wonder if Microsoft is reading this.)

* Great improvements to Project Explorer, including Go Into and Go To functionality. (The goal here is to get this explorer up to par with the Package Explorer.)

* Improvements to the online help function, including a quick search that's limited within the selected book or topic.

* Various smaller improvements in the IDE itself, such as a context menu that lets you choose how you want to open resources (for example, just as text or with the built-in editor), as well as a nice Workspace page in the Preferences dialog box that lets you specify how many work spaces to remember and whether to prompt for work space on start-up.

* The inclusion of a handy "breadcrumb" feature for debugging.

Eclipse 4 Unwrapped

As is already indicated by version 0.9, which has just been released, Eclipse 4 will incorporate several familiar web technologies and put them to new uses.

The Eclipse development environment has become a very popular open source project. A flexible software tool kit, Eclipse can integrate the products of several vendors as plug-ins, for example for modelling, development and software tests; for some time now, Eclipse hasn't just been about Java. The Eclipse Foundation behind the development environment has grown into an influential consortium: in November 2001, IBM introduced the source code of a development environment into the newly established Eclipse.org open source community. IBM then dominated the scene for a long time, until the foundation was established as an independent and non-profit organisation for the development of the Eclipse platform in 2004.

At the end of June, the Eclipse developers released Eclipse 3.5, a new, coordinated Eclipse package. The current collection, called Galileo, includes more than 33 Eclipse projects with over 24 million lines of code, which makes it the largest preconfigured package the Eclipse community has ever put together: more than 380 committers from 44 organisations have contributed to the new version.

The plan for the forthcoming Eclipse 4 is to offer features like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for designing SWT widgets whose appearance can be directly manipulated using a CSS editor. Widget layout, however, will probably continue to be handled by SWT layout managers. According to the Eclipse programmers, the CSS engine can also be used for "styling" other objects because it is "headless".

In future, developers will be able to create Eclipse components in JavaScript. For this purpose, the development environment will be given not only a JavaScript engine, but also a "modularity framework".

Eclipse India Summit 2009 - A General Summary

In the week when a total solar eclipse of the longest duration in 21st century held special interest for scientists and general public as its path of totality passed through thickly populated western, central, eastern and northeastern regions of India, Bangalore in South India was witness to an Eclipse summit of a different kind. Over 400 Eclipse users, enthusiasts and professionals, gathered at the Chancery Pavilion July 17-18 to learn and celebrate the success of an ecosystem that was benefiting from quick time-to-market and standardized user experiences by building their tools using Eclipse technology.

With keynotes, sessions and workshops that were oriented to cater to the pulse of the Eclipse ecosystem in India, the 2009 edition of Saltmarch Media's annual Eclipse India Summit (EIS) provided attendees with a hands-on understanding of product development essentials, modeling techniques, eDevelopment and most importantly the insider information on how companies and individuals are planning to harness Eclipse today, and in the future. For both veterans and newcomers to the world of Eclipse, EIS 2009 provided participants with a well-balanced learning experience that guaranteed they went back with a richer understanding of the technologies that make a difference to their careers.

More power to organizations such as Saltmarch Media and AnCIT who are putting all their might and resources, and to all the sponsors who help make it happen.

Open-source Software Security Vendor Praises 25 Projects

Palamida, a vendor that sells software and services around open-source software security and legal compliance, has named 25 open-source projects companies should not hesitate to use.

Some, such as the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment) and the MySQL database, are widely known. But Palamida also included software like the FreeType font engine and script.aculo.us, a set of JavaScript libraries for Web 2.0-style applications and sites.

All the projects on the list are stable and enterprise-ready, Palamida said.

"If you aren't thinking about using open-source as part of your development process, you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage," said Theresa Bui Friday, vice president of product marketing and a co-founder of the San Francisco company.

Palamida thought it wise to distribute the 25 projects over a number of categories, since open source "has permeated up and down the stack," she said.

The company's announcement also reflects its changing business strategy.

Today, Palamida's software scans a customer's code base, determines which open-source software is in use, and provides information about associated licenses, known vulnerablities and available patches.

But when formed in 2003, the company initially focused on licensing issues, because most of its early customers were software vendors, Friday said: "Five years ago, the management issue was solely around licenses, and license terms and obligations."

Palamida subsequently began hearing that customers were sending the open-source licensing reports over to their security teams. "We realized these lists were useful to a different organization than IP management," she said.

Overall Palamida and its competitor Black Duck Software "have been moving into providing a tool for software development," said Redmonk analyst Michael Coté. "Instead of making sure your open-source code use is healthy from only a legal perspective ... the idea is to make sure that your overall use of OSS is healthy."

Foundations for the World Wide Grid

The dream of using the internet to allow people to access as much computer processing and storage power as they need, when they need it, is a step closer thanks to European researchers.

Although a World Wide Grid running on top of the internet is still probably years away from being a reality, the grid, like the web before it, is starting to take shape between academic and scientific institutions.

Where the internet is a communications channel between computers, the grid goes beyond this by not just using the internet for communications but also as a means of sharing computing resources. Every computer and user can access and make use of the combined resources of the grid.

As things stand at the moment there are a series of isolated grids which allow the resources of clusters of computers, at different universities for instance, to be shared. Each of these grids is usually based on its own proprietary middleware which makes interoperability impossible. Middleware is a type of software which connects hardware resources to a grid.

There are different middlewares available, each tailored for different scientific, commercial or industrial usage.