June 26-June 30

In the run-up to the Eclipse Callisto Simultaneous Release, the Eclipse Community saw various releases from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). While Actuate upgraded its Collaborative Reporting Architecture and the Eclipse Communication Framework project reached the ‘Version 0.8.6’ milestone, IBM hit a double whammy. First, it announced that its Rational division would make its Team API product available for free. IBM also placed its Aperi consortium in the Eclipse foundation and announced a formal relationship with SNIA. BEA Systems’ Bill Roth and Wind River’s Steve Heintz discussed at length about the shift of large enterprises towards Eclipse and Eclipse-based tools, while Mike Potter offered various reasons why open source developers should be excited about the free Adobe Flex 2.

Eclipse Communication Framework Updated

The Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) project over at Eclipse.org has come out with version 0.8.6, a stable build release that supports tabbed browsing and fixes some disconnect issues that cropped up in the previous releases.

The Eclipse Communication Framework provides APIs that simplify the creation of interoperable, extensible, reliable distributed applications. The framework is useful for aiding the creation of plugins, tools, or full Eclipse RCP applications, that require client-server and/or peer-to-peer messaging and communications.

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Callisto Will Put Eclipse Ahead of Other Competition

The end-of-June Callisto Simultaneous Release will not only align the schedules of 10 linked projects in the Eclipse IDE, but will also be a major milestone on Eclipse’s path to becoming the IT industry’s de facto Java platform, finds Stacy Cowley over at CRN.

Ian Skerrett, director of marketing for the Eclipse Foundation revealed that there was latency between the releases that they needed to address. “If we can be on this predictable heartbeat of release, people can plan a lot more easily on how they incorporate Eclipse,” he says.

ISVs say Callisto is a key step forward in Eclipse's evolution. For the first time, a batch of Eclipse projects have synchronized their release schedule with the core Eclipse platform's annual June update, allowing developers to field updates all at once rather than piecemeal. “One of the historical problems with Eclipse has been that each of the independent projects releases on its own schedule, says Tim Lang, vice president of developer programs at Business Objects. “From a software vendor perspective, that’s very hard to QA your products against.”

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IBM to Put Aperi in Eclipse Foundation

IBM is placing Aperi, its open source storage management group, under indirect industry authorization. Aperi will join the Eclipse Foundation and will form a formal relationship with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), writes Chris Mellor over at Techworld.

Previously, IBM founded Aperi in October, 2005, in such a way that implied the SNIA's own Storage system Management Interface Specification (SMI-S) was unacceptably slow in coming to fruition. Last week, Sun Microsystems abruptly left Aperi and joined an Anti-Aperi Group (AAG). This group collectively affirmed the supremacy of SNIA in approving specifications and technologies for SMI-S. IBM will now have to submit Aperi for oversight to SNIA.

Robin Glasgow, SNIA executive director, stated: “This week, the Aperi community announce their intention to form within The Eclipse Foundation and also state their plans to establish a formal relationship with the SNIA.” He was very keen to unify the activities of Aperi and the AAG. “All members of the Aperi community and all of the companies referenced in AAG are active, contributing SNIA members and the SNIA recognizes that they are all passionate about the success of SMI-S.”

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Actuate Releases Version 9 of its Collaborative Reporting Architecture

Actuate Corporation has introduced Actuate 9, an Enterprise Reporting Application platform based on its new Collaborative Reporting Architecture, which is powered by the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT). Actuate’s new release aims at helping companies make the shift from a ‘closed Business Intelligence (BI) model’ where information access and analysis is siloed, to an ‘open BI model’ that speeds report development by supporting collaboration amongst people of every skill level. Actuate 9 intends to transform the broken process of negotiating reporting and analytic requirements among IT developers, business analysts and end users. It plans to achieve this by applying the open source principles of participation, iterative development and modularity, for the benefit of an organization’s Business Intelligence initiatives.

Actuate’s Collaborative Reporting Architecture allows IT developers to quickly create a report and offer it immediately to business analysts and end users, who can use its new interactive capabilities to refine and polish the report in order to clarify their needs with IT. Design changes can be passed between these constituencies to grow the reporting application effectively because it continuously meets the changing needs of every user.

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The Large Enterprise Shift Towards Eclipse

Only a few days away from the huge Callisto Simultaneous Release, Eclipse has become hot property in the developer world. Eclipse is being used by two-thirds of Java shops today, and has taken the market for IDEs by storm over the last two years. Part of the adoption growth has been due to large ISVs dropping their own IDEs in favor of Eclipse, says Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Gardner recently sat down for a chat with BEA Systems’Bill Roth and Wind River’s Steve Heintz. Roth and Heintz explored the reasons why infrastructure ISVs are using Eclipse instead of their own development environments and why different large software tools, platform and runtime providers are 'hip' to Eclipse. Both believed that Eclipse was a model of other software projects to come.

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IBM Rational Gives Team API Away for Free

IBM is offering its Rational Team API for download free of charge at its alphaworks web site. The unified, client-side Java API is a technical preview for IBM Rational ClearCase, ClearQuest, and RequistePro customers. The download package consists of reference documentation, tutorials, and samples of an API that is available for evaluation in IBM Rational Software Development Platform, Team Products, Release 7. The technical preview provides access to a subset of the capabilities of ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Requisite Pro.

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ant4eclipse 0.4.0 Released

The open source project ant4eclipse has now been upgraded to version 0.4.0. ant4eclipse provides a set of Ant tasks that can be used to integrate Eclipse configurations into Ant buildscripts. Version 0.4.0 comes with Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) support and also helps in building Eclipse plug-ins.

The aim of the ant4eclipse project is to avoid the redundancy of Eclipse and Ant configurations. More precisely, it consists of Ant tasks that are able to read and work with some of Eclipse’s configuration files.

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AccuRev Announces SCM Integration with Bugzilla

AccuRev has integrated its best-of-breed Software Configuration Management (SCM) solution with Bugzilla, the open source defect tracking system. AccuRev and Bugzilla will work together to tie the daily work of an organization’s software development process to the issues managed in the issue tracking system. Utilizing the AccuBridge for Bugzilla, developers can perform routine Bugzilla defect resolution tasks within AccuRev or their IDE. The bi-directional integration between the Bugzilla database and the AccuRev SCM repository also allows developers to store and monitor AccuRev change package activity from within Bugzilla, improving the traceability of all development work.

“Bugzilla allows our team to easily track the status of changes made to the source code for feature enhancements and resolving bugs,” says Chris Geggis, Release Manager, Acopia Networks. “We selected AccuRev for its open support of various issue tracking tools and this integration appears to be an efficient method to continue working in our incumbent bug tracking tool until we require something more.”

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Adobe Flex 2: Why Open Source Developers Should Be Excited

Mike Potter says there is lots of good news behind the Flex 2 launch for open source developers. Giving an in-depth look into the free launch in his blog, Mike explains that the goal of open source software has always been to create software that can be free, not in price but in terms of restrictions for use.

The availability of source code and the ability to modify that source code are important parts in the free/open source software movement, he says. Mike goes on to talk of the benefits the new offering provides to developers.

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OSGi Alliance Releases First Three Compliance Certified Products

The OSGi Alliance has announced the release of the first three products to be certified compliant to OSGi Service Platform Release 4 (R4). GateSpace Telematics’ Knopflerfish Pro 2.0, ProSyst Software’s mBedded Server 6.0 and the open source implementation Equinox 3.2 OSGi R4 implementation of Eclipse have passed the R4 certification requirements.

The OSGi Service Platform, with its dynamic module system for Java, enables applications to be developed, maintained and upgraded remotely and dynamically and allows for interoperability between the different OSGi based devices and computers. The OSGi compliance certification program assures customers of interoperability for OSGi applications and services running on platforms certified compliant with the OSGi Service Platform Release 4 specification. The compliance certification program enables developers to build solutions for a broader variety of reliable product solutions that include OSGi technology.

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