************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * February 2004 * * * ************************************* News and Comments Sean Neeley and I attended the EclipseCon 2004 Conference which was held February 3-5 at the DisneyLand Hotel in Annaheim, California. The choice of location was quite interesting - computer geeks and young families in the same hotel all listening to elevator and hallway music like the Davey Crockett theme song and that way-too-memorable song based on the Disney ride "It's a Small World". Regardless of the location, my impression of the importance of Eclipse was reinforced by EclipseCon. I believe that Eclipse and Visual Studio .NET will be the predominant development environments for many years into the future. VS .NET will be used for applications built in C#, J# and VB.Net that target only Windows. Eclipse will be used for everything else - from mainframes and UNIX to embedded systems, using Java, C/C++, COBOL, DATABUS, XML, UML and various other development tools. JBuilder, CodeWarrior, NetBeans and other IDEs will fall by the wayside. This month's article is a summary of what Sean and I saw and heard at EclipseCon 2004. don.wills@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** EclipseCon 2004 Conference Report 634 people from 220 companies attended the EclipseCon 2004 Conference. Here is a welcome note that the attendees found in their EclipseCon 2004 Program Guide: "Welcome to EclispeCon 2004, the first technical conference to focus on the power of Eclipse, a multi-vendor platform for tool integration and interoperability. Since its introduction more than two years ago, the Eclipse open source platform has attracted a large, vibrant community of developers, tool providers and consumers that are using, leveraging and extending the platform in a myriad of productive and innovative ways. The rapid adoption of Eclipse over the past year (currently with more than 10,000 download requests per day for the Eclipse Platform) demonstrates Eclipse's viability as a universal platform for tools integration. We are pleased to present this inaugural EclipseCon, which brings together users, developers, educators, researchers and other members of the Eclipse community to exchange experiences and chart the future of this key open technology." EclipseCon consisted of five keynote speeches, about 50 technical presentations, 25 technical exchanges and Birds-of-a-Feathers, and 20 exhibits over a period of three very full days. Although the welcome note said that the target audience included users of Eclipse, most of the technical presentations and exchanges were for companies, like DB/C Software Company, that develop Eclipse add-in software. Here are some representative titles of EclipseCon sessions: "How to Build Your Favorite Language IDE" "Debugger Implementors Technology Exchange" "Integrating Team Tools into Eclipse" "Text Editors and How to Implement Your Own" "Lessons Learned in Plug-in Development" The most important event at the conference was the formal announcement of the creation of an independent not-for-profit corporation, the Eclipse Foundation, which has assumed ownership and control of Eclipse. Before the creation of the Eclipse Foundation, Eclipse was a consortium of many companies that was sponsored and controlled primarily by IBM. In the past, competitors of IBM (e.g. Sun) have been critical of Eclipse because of its lack of independence. With the creation of the Eclipse Foundation, this is no longer an issue. Most of the funding and contributions of developers to the new organization will be provided by these eight strategic founding members: IBM, Intel, QNX, Ericsson, HP, MontaVista, SAP and Serena. In addition, there are more than 40 add-in providers that are members of the Eclipse Foundation and provide smaller contributions. Novell recently announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation and that all of its development tools will be unified to work on the Eclipse platform. It was really interesting to talk with other developers about their experiences in building Eclipse plugins. It turns out that the issues that DB/C Software Company ran into while building DDT are similar to what others have experienced. Many of the presentations were about Eclipse Release 3.0 which is currently being tested with a planned June release. DB/C Software Company will provide a version of DDT that works in Eclipse 3.0 soon after the 3.0 release. Eclipse 3.0 will incorporate many new features, including a feature called the Rich Client Platform (RCP). The RCP is a minimally-featured version of Eclipse that doesn't contain any programmer tools, or even anything special for adding programmer tools. Instead, the RCP is a platform for various kinds of end-user applications. Readers of this newsletter may be interested in using the RCP as a platform for their own custom-built end-user applications. Eclipse Plugin Central is a new resource that was announced at EclipseCon. The Plugin Central web site is a place where you can search for plugins, and where various plugins are discussed and rated. Although it is just getting started, this web site looks like it will become a good resource for finding Eclipse-based software products. In summary, EclipseCon 2004 was very worthwhile for developers of plugins. If you are thinking about writing an Eclipse plugin, you should read the book "Contributing to Eclipse - Principles, Patterns and Plugins" by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck, and you should plan on attending EclipseCon 2005. The Eclipse Foundation web site is www.eclipse.org. You can find out more about EclipseCon at www.eclipsecon.org. And finally, the Eclipse Plugin Central web site is www.eclipseplugincentral.com. ****************************************************************************** DB/C DX Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX Fundamentals Date: February 25-27, 2004 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'. 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