Eclipse TechForge Launched

OSTG, the folks that produce Sourceforge have launched the new Eclipse.Techforge.com. SourceForge has already been the home for hundreds of interesting Eclipse related open source projects, so it is great to see them start a specific channel for Eclipse.

Philippe Ombredanne from nexb is the editor of the site. I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Philippe at JavaOne. He graciously volunteer to work in the Eclipse booth. Philippe is a great supporter of Eclipse and I think he will do a great job.

Million Download Challenge Has Started

3.1 has been declared and the count to a million has started. It is still not to late to join the Million Download Challenge.

JavaOne announcements

Day 1 at JavaOne was a lot of fun. The Eclipse booth was busy and we gave away a lot of T-shirts. In good fun, we even had Roumen Strobl from the NetBean’s team come by to collect his Eclipse T-shirt. I am sure he will wear it proudly back in Prague.

What was really nice is the number of people that came up and said ‘Thank you for such a great IDE.’ I wish all the people that worked on making Eclipse a great tool could hear such praise.

There has also been a wealth of Eclipse related announcements. We are trying to list most of the announcements on the eclipse.org home page.

It is great to see Compuware announce their plans to base OptimaJ on Eclipse. For those that might not know, OptimaJ had been built on NetBeans. Sybase is also getting a lot of attention for their new Workplace product. It is also cool to see an Eclipse plug-in for developing software on digital pay TV set-top boxes.

Countdown to 3.1 and JavaOne

Next week is going to be pretty busy. Eclipse 3.1 will be released. Don’t forget to sign-up for the Million Download Challenge. Ed Burnette has started a pool on when 3.1 will be declared. I’ll predict June 27.

JavaOne is shaping up to be very busy. I will be spending a lot of the time in the Eclipse booth (booth #1534). Please drop by, say hello, maybe even collect an Eclipse t-shirt. Mike Milinkovich, Bjorn Freeman-Benson and myself will also be doing press interviews. Bill Dudney is going to interview Mike and Bjorn on Sys-con TV, Bjorn is going to be interview on The Serverside and I am scheduled on ZDNet IT Matters.

Also expect to see a lot of press releases from companies talking about their Eclipse products. There are going to be some really cool announcements. Next week, I hope to spend some time blogging about some of the highlights.

Busy time for Eclipse related announcements

Companies are starting to roll out their JavaOne announcements. It is great to see companies like JBoss and Borland highlight their Eclipse strategies. I was also pleasantly surprise to see e-Bay announce an open source initaitive, including an Eclipse plug-in.

Next week, I know more companies are making some pretty cool announcements about Eclipse. It should be a fun week.

Press releases for next week

Next Monday we are going to issue 3 press releases at JavaOne: 1)Release 1 will discuss the launch of 3.1 and the other project release, such as Web Tools, TPTP, etc., 2) Release 2 will highlight Eclipse RCP and 3) Release 3 will announce the 100th organization to join Eclipse.

Below are draft versions of release 1 & 2. I’ve collected substantial feedback from the project teams but I would certainly appreciate any feedback from the Eclipse community. bwt, I have not included a number of external quotes, since they still need to be approved.

Also, I’m not going to publish release 3 until Monday. Anyone care to guess the name of the organization? This company truly reflects the global nature of Eclipse.

Release 1

Eclipse Delivers Tools Platform for Software Development Lifecycle

New and Enhanced Open Source Tools and Frameworks for J2SE 5, J2EE 1.4, Web Services, Testing and Monitoring, GUI Builder and Aspect Oriented Programming

JAVA ONE (BOOTH #1534), SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—June 27, 2005—The Eclipse Foundation today announced releases of several Eclipse open source projects that provide a platform spanning the software development lifecycle. Building on the success of the widely used Eclipse Java IDE, the Eclipse community is delivering on the vision of providing a platform for integrating software development tools, including support for testing, performance monitoring, business intelligence and reporting, Java, C/C++ and web application development, and aspect oriented programming.

“Eclipse is delivering on its vision of providing a universal development platform that includes tools and frameworks spanning the entire software lifecycle,” stated Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of Eclipse Foundation. “A lot of people know and love Eclipse as a great Java IDE. However, the real impact Eclipse has had on software development is providing the platform for ISVs to build and integrate software development tools. Developers, architects and testers benefit from an ecosystem of over 100 ISVs and hundreds of products which allow development teams choice in the tools best suited to their needs.”

A new version of the core Eclipse development platform, Eclipse Platform 3.1, will be available for download the week of June 27. Over the next 30 days, other Eclipse projects will make available new releases of their technologies supported on Eclipse 3.1. As a single platform, these powerful new releases enable programmers to:

• Create and Deploy J2EE 1.4 Applications – New wizards and tools can be used to create and deploy J2EE applications. The leading J2EE vendors – BEA, Borland, IBM, JBoss and ObjectWeb – will use these tools as the platform for their J2EE development tools.
• Deep integration with J2SE 5.0 - Everything developers love about Eclipse, including refactoring, quick fix, search, code formatting, will work seamlessly with J2SE 5.0 features, for instance annotations and generics.
• Build Rich Client Applications – New and improved tools can be used to create rich client applications on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).
• Scale Up – Significant performance improvements to the base platform and testing platform will support large development teams with faster startups, more responsive user interfaces and smaller memory requirements.
• Develop and Extend with Ease – A major theme of the Eclipse releases is to improve the usability and extensibility of the tools, including Java development tools, testing and performance tools.
• Create and Validate Web Services – The Eclipse Web service validation tools check conformance to the WS-I profiles and are used to create the Java reference implementation of the WS-I test tools.
• Easily Create Web Applications – New editors allow for the easy creation of JSP, HTML, XML, CSS, DTD and JavaScript files.
• Streamline Testing and Performance Tuning – Tight integration with JUnit and new GUI capabilities enable a more streamlined approach for unit testing and performance problem isolation on the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform
• Create User Interfaces for Eclipse RCP – The Eclipse Visual Editor now supports the ability to create Eclipse RCP applications.
• Improved Ant support – New debug and refactoring support for Ant scripts. Easily create an Eclipse project from an Ant script and export an Ant script from Eclipse.
• Leverage Aspect Oriented Programming – New AspectJ 5 release provides support for J2SE 5.0 including annotations, generics and a new annotation-based development style.

The projects that have scheduled releases are Eclipse Platform, Test and Performance Tools Platform, Web Tools Platform, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools Platform, Eclipse Modeling Framework, Graphical Editing Framework, UML2, Visual Editor and AspectJ. For a complete list of project features and corresponding project downloads, visit URL.

Release 2

Eclipse Enhances Rich Client Platform

Organizations Build New Generation of Rich Client Applications on Eclipse Platform

JAVA ONE (BOOTH 1534), SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—June 27, 2005—The Eclipse Foundation today released Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) 3.1, delivering improved tools, easier installations and cross-platform builds to enable programmers to rapidly develop and deploy rich client applications. Open source and commercial organizations have embraced Eclipse RCP as the platform for building next generation rich client applications.

“The Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is here and now, and we’re only continuing to make it better with more powerful tools,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director, Eclipse Foundation. “Organizations creating rich client applications are benefiting from Eclipse’s dynamic plug-in architecture and update manager. The ease of development and simplicity of this latest release will help fuel even more widespread adoption of Eclipse RCP.”

Open source applications such as a RSS newsreader, desktop content management and stock trading are built on Eclipse RCP. Commercial applications as wide ranging as customer relationship management (CRM), revenue optimization and enterprise resource planning (ERP) have been built using Eclipse RCP.

Eclipse RCP provides a powerful and complete way to build and deploy client applications that run on Linux, Windows, OS/X and other desktop platforms. Eclipse RCP includes:

-A simple dynamic component model for building plug-ins that is based on the industry standard OSGi specification.
-The ability to create desktop applications that adopt the native look and feel of the Windows, Linux or OS/X platform.
-An update manager that allows applications to be managed from a central server and automatically update deployed desktop applications with patches and new features.
-A set of frameworks that accelerate the development of rich client applications, including a generic workbench, menu management and preferences management.

New features and functionality in Eclipse RCP 3.1 include:

•Improved Performance – Quicker startup time and reduce memory requirements streamline the end user experience of an Eclipse RCP based application.
•Expanded tools support – The Eclipse Visual Editor now supports SWT making it easier to design the user interface for rich client applications. Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) had added tools for creating and branding RCP applications.
•Automatic Delivery – Support for Java Web Start (JNLP) and improved support for dynamic plug-in gets makes it easier to deploy RCP applications.
•Visual Editor Support – The Eclipse Visual Editor now supports the ability to create Eclipse RCP applications.

For a complete list of features and functionality in Eclipse RCP 3.1, visit www.eclipse.org/rcp.

Free Eclipse T-Shirts at JavaOne

Eclipse will be giving away Eclipse t-shirts at JavaOne. All thanks to the cooperation and sponsorship of 12 Eclipse member companies: Actuate, Agitar, BEA, Catalyst/Openmake, Compuware, Datamirror, Enerjy, Exadel, JBoss, M7, Parasoft and Sybase.

As with all good things in life, nothing is completely free. To receive a t-shirt, all you will need to do is visit the JavaOne booths of the sponsor companies. Each company will be giving away ‘We Support Eclipse’ buttons. Collect buttons from 6 different companies and then come to the Eclipse booth to get your t-shirt.

The idea is to promote at JavaOne the large ecosystem of vendors that are building great products on Eclipse. At the same time, I also hope you will see a lot of JavaOne attendees wearing Eclipse buttons and t-shirts.

Free Passes to JavaOne Pavilion

As a JavaOne exhibitor, Eclipse received a number of free 1 day passes to the exhibit hall. Let me know if you are interested in using one of these passes. I will need to mail them to you, so e-mail (ian skerrett at eclipse dot org) me your mailing address . I probably need to mail them by June 24 to ensure you get them in time.

Please remember these only provide access to the exhibits hall, no technical sessions.

UPDATE: I’ve given out all the JavaOne passes. (06/22/2005)

Million Download Challenge

About two weeks ago, I suggested we do something to celebrate once Eclipse 3.1 reaches the million download mark. Kim Horne came up with a great idea that allows all Eclipse enthusiasts to participate and help the broader community. Her idea is to have willing participants donate volunteer time or money to a charity of your choice based on the number of days less than 60 it takes to reach 1 million downloads. For instance, if Eclipse 3.1 hit 1 million downloads in 20 days then those that participate will donate 40 times whatever was pledged.

We are going to call it the Million Download Challenge. A pledge sheet has been setup on the Eclipse Wiki. When 3.1 is released, we will post a real-time counter of the download total so everyone can track the progress. I certainly hope lots of people participate, celebrate the success of Eclipse and help the broader community.

Macromedia joins Eclipse

Macromedia has just announced that they are joining Eclipse and building their next generation tools based on Eclipse. This is very cool and it seems others agree.