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                    *          DB/C Newsletter          *
                    *             March 2005            *
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                              News and Comments

     I attended EclipseCon 2005 in early March.  After last year's great
conference, my expectations were high - and I wasn't disappointed.  This
month's article is a report about what I saw and heard.

                                                     don.wills@dbcsoftware.com

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                                EclipseCon 2005

     More than 1000 people attended the EclipseCon 2005 Conference.  This
represents a more than 50% increase in attendance when compared with last
year's conference.  One of the keynote speakers noted that there were only
four no-shows for this year's conference.  Both numbers are indicative of
the growing importance and acceptance of Eclipse.

     EclipseCon 2005 consisted of 3 keynote speeches, more than 50 sessions,
13 tutorials, and various birds-of-a-feather gatherings during the four day
conference.  In addition, 37 exhibitors showed their products for two days
in the exhibition hall.

     The most important announcement at the show was the addition of five
new Strategic Developers - BEA, Borland, Computer Associates, Scapa and
Sybase.  Becoming a Strategic Developer indicates a significant corporate
commitment.  Each Strategic Developer is required to contribute 8 full-time
programmers plus $250,000 per year to the Eclipse project.

     With these latest additions, almost all large software companies have
now joined the Eclipse camp.  Two major exceptions are Microsoft and Sun.

     Borland's history and current plans for Eclipse are quite interesting.
Borland was an original founder of Eclipse, but did not initially make a
large contribution of programming resources or money.  Historically,
Borland's JBuilder was a direct competitor to Eclipse, and a large part
of Borland's revenue came from products that were Microsoft-specific.
With its announcement that Eclipse will be an integral part of its new
ALM product line, Borland has decided that Eclipse is where its future
lies.  This is a big deal.

     Another significant announcement was the creation of the Business
Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project.  Actuate Corporation, a leader
in Java reporting tools, has donated a large codebase that is the basis
for BIRT.  This may be of interest to DB/C users who are looking for an
inexpensive, cross-platform report generation tool.  Crystal Reports and
others selling expensive reporting products may see their markets erode
because of this new, open-source alternative.

     Other significant announcements include BEA's support for the creation
of the Web Tools Project and the work of several companies to extend
Eclipse for use with various other programming languages.  Microsoft
even showed up to demonstrate Visual Studio (that technical session was
not well received because it turned out to basically be a sales pitch).

     In summary, it was a quite worthwhile week.  I'm looking forward
to EclipseCon 2006 which is planned for March 2006 in Santa Clara.


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                          DB/C DX Class Schedule

   Class:     DB/C DX Fundamentals
   Date:      May, 2005
   Location:  to be determined

For information, send email to admin@dbcsoftware.com.


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