************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * April 2003 * * * ************************************* News and Comments After several months of concerted effort, it now appears that we will finally start beta testing of the full DB/C DX 13.0 software product in May. All licensees of DB/C DX who have current support will be notified by email about the availability of a beta test version. This month's article is an update on the Eclipse platform that we've discussed several times in this newsletter. We're very committed to using and providing tools for Eclipse. We use it for both C and Java development. At Subject, Wills & Company, Eclipse has been adopted as the only Java development environment that programmers are allowed to use. We're always interested in your feedback, so let us know your reaction to Eclipse either to me directly via email or to the community on dbctalk. don.wills@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** Eclipse Update Eclipse 2.1 was released on March 28. This release incorporates many enhancements suggested by various interested parties. Eclipse 2.1 will be the platform for the new integrated development environment (IDE) that will be part of DB/C DX 13. An overview of the history of Eclipse and its technical features are found in the February 2002 DB/C Newsletter. Essentially, Eclipse is the foundation that can be used to build a sophisticated IDE for any programming language. Eclipse is open source and is available at www.eclipse.org. Borland, IBM, Red Hat, SuSE, Merant, Rational, TogetherSoft and WebGain were the founding members of the Eclipse consortium which was created in November 2001. More than 20 companies have joined the Eclipse board since then. Some of the better known companies that joined in 2002 are HP, Oracle, Sybase, SAP, Fujitsu and Hitachi. With these additions, most of the big players in the software industry are members - with the notable exceptions of Microsoft and Sun. Eclipse plugins are the mechanism for adding features to the Eclipse foundation. A Java development plugin (JDT) is included with the standard download of Eclipse. A C/C++ development plugin (CDT) is available separately from www.eclipse.org. The Eclipse foundation is written almost entirely in Java. The JDT and CDT are 100% Java. However, CDT requires the GCC compiler (which is a native executable) to function. The DB/C DX 13 Eclipse plugin will be similar to CDT. It will require the DB/C DX native compiler and runtime (dbcmp and dbc). Don't let the fact that Eclipse is written in Java make you think it is slow. It's not. Eclipse uses native GUI widgets instead of the Java Swing GUI widgets (which are drawn by Java code). The result is that Eclipse looks exactly like a real native GUI application because it is. And the performance is great! In addition to Java and C/C++, plugins are available for developing programs in COBOL, Pascal, PHP, Python and other languages. Interestingly, there are a couple of early release plugins for C#. There are several hundred plugins available that add various features to Eclipse. Some of the plugins are free; some are standalone commercial software products; others are part of commercial software products. Here is a list of some of the standalone plugins that are available: . SlickEdit plugin - an advanced, multi-language source code editor . XMLBuddy and other editors for XML, JavaScript, XSLT, etc. . Tomcat plugin - Tomcat is a standalone Java Servlet and JSP engine . easySQL - execute SQL statements to any database from Eclipse . Wiki editor - see www.wiki.org if you don't know what Wiki is . Mathematica plugin - evaluate any expression . Grand-Rapid - an HTML browser that can be embedded in your application . Super Search - search Google and others directly from an Eclipse editor . CodeBeamer - team collaboration for software bug/task/issue management . picEdit - view any TIFF, JPEG, PNG or other file . mp3view - play your MP3 files in Eclipse . Spell Checker - general purpose spell checker In addition, several useful plugins are included with the base Eclipse download. These include: . the Eclipse Xerces plugin - a standard XML parser . the Eclipse Ant plugin - a 'make' replacement written in Java . the Eclipse CVS plugin - full featured access to CVS repositories As an open source project, Eclipse is less than 18 months old. In that short time, it has become a serious contender to Visual Studio for Windows development with Java, C and C++. For development on UNIX platforms in a GUI environment, Eclipse is the standard. In the embedded world, Eclipse is being adopted as the basis for development tools by several industry leaders. And finally, several universities are now using Eclipse in their introductory programming classes. Predictions are dangerous, but it appears that in the near future Eclipse will become the overwhelming industry standard IDE foundation. DB/C DX will be along for the ride. Here are some web sites of interest: . www.eclipse.org - the Eclipse home page . www.zclipse.org - a source for open source plugins . eclipse-plugins.2y.net - a source for shareware and commercial plugins . www.slickedit.com - information about the SlickEdit commercial product . www.xmlbuddy.com - information about XMLBuddy ****************************************************************************** DB/C DX Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX Fundamentals Date: June 23-25, 2003 Location: Oak Brook, Illinois For information, send email to admin@dbcsoftware.com. ****************************************************************************** Subscribing to the DB/C Newsletter If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you monthly, just send an email message to 'dbcnews-subscribe@dbcsoftware.com'. The newsletter will be delivered to the email address from which the message was sent.