Eclipse World Review
As I wait to give my talk at Eclipse World I decided to post some of the highlights from the event.
Without a doubt, Eclipse is winning the Java IDE war. Major competitors such as JBuilder are dropping their products and even joining the Eclipse foundation as members. Several major companies such as Oracle and BEA have also embraced Eclipse as a development platform for their technologies. Most exciting is the mention that Symbian will be supporting Eclipse as the exclusive development IDE for their operating system.
As I wait to give my talk at Eclipse World I decided to post some of the highlights from the event.
Without a doubt, Eclipse is winning the Java IDE war. Major competitors such as JBuilder are dropping their products and even joining the Eclipse foundation as members. Several major companies such as Oracle and BEA have also embraced Eclipse as a development platform for their technologies. Most exciting is the mention that Symbian will be supporting Eclipse as the exclusive development IDE for their operating system.
All that success aside, Eclipse is trying very hard to change their image as an Java IDE and become known as an Open Source foundation for quality tools. Similar to the evolution of the Apache group, which started as an Open Source HTTP server; Eclipse is looking to promote Open Source tools and rich client platforms for applications. Looking at the impressive list of projects that are actively being developed by the Eclipse foundation, I think they are well on their way!
On the floor were various vendors that in some way leverage Eclipse to provide a better experience for developers. Of note was ILog (www.ilog.com) and their JFaces product that provides a very comprehensive Graphing framework. Actuate (www.actuate.com) had one of the first commercial application of the Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tool) Project.
I personally attended talks about AspectJ and AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) and GEF (Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework).
The GEF presentation was very comprehensive. I find myself wanting us to create a complete visual authoring tool for mWorks using GEF. GEF is fully Object Oriented framework for creating visual editors that run within eclipse. It would be possible to use GEF to provide a WYSIWYG editor for authoring MIL.
The AspectJ stuff was also interesting and the idea of leveraging this coding approach in a MIDP setting is very interesting indeed. AspectJ out-of-the-box however is not practical for MIDP because it requires the inclusion of a 40k jar lib in addition to the MIDlet code … given that most devices have an upward limit of 64k that doesn’t give us much room left to work with. There is,however, a subset of AOP that could be used and doesn’t require the inclusion of the AspectJ jar. I look forward to learning more about his possibility.
