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10 Years Eclipse Party at JugMK

Not the Eclipse you are looking for ?
A few days ago at JugMK we had the Eclipse 10 years party so I thought it would be nice to write a few words about  Eclipse.
Ten years ago IBM decided to opensource eclipse 1.0 which had releases for both Windows and Linux which is very important since at that point of time Windows was at it's strongest point. The Eclipse consortium was founded the same year but Eclipse  Foundation wasn't created until 2004, the same year that the first EclipseCon took place. It's fun to remember some of the companies like Borland that were side by side to  the giants like SAP and IBM and of some importance in the Java world. These days  there are hundreds of companies that are members of the foundation.
A few top level projects that are essential were mentioned :
  •  Eclipse Modeling Project 
This project main focus is on the evolution and promotion of model-based development technologies within the Eclipse community by providing a unified set of modeling frameworks, tooling, and standards implementations. 
  • Eclipse Runtime  
One of the great top level projects that is under the Eclipse umbrella is Eclipse RT. This top level project has sub projects like the Jetty Web server  and the well known EclipseLink JPA provider. RT projects target "clients" and "servers" across embedded devices, desktops, and enterprise systems, and provide those intermediate software services which enable applications to be more easily and concisely constructed across these environments.  

By providing a consistent symmetric architecture, Eclipse RT technology enables developers to focus on the business problem at hand and still have many system architecture options available at deployment time.

The future 


Eclipse has made big difference over the past decade  and it is more than clear that is here to stay. There are several projects that got my attention that are still in incubation:
  • e4
e4 is the incubator for Eclipse 4.x which is created to be  the foundation on Eclipse and OSGI. 
There are few simplification that allow easier writing of plugins, better control over all Eclipse based solutions  and simply enabling  more and more programmers to program on the platform while at the same time keeping the backward compatibility with the applications based on clean API's . In order to reach these goals, Eclipse APIs are re-factored into services that use a uniform application model  which supports dependency injection to run in multiple different contexts ;the Workbench is uniformly modeled to provide introspection, CSS styling and declarative UI markup  and many more initiatives in areas such as-flexible resources, command recording, scripting and writing plugins in other languages. 

  • Eclipse Orion
Orion is one of the projects under the Eclipse top-level project. The project is currently in the Incubation phase. The premise behind this project is simple, why do we web apps on the desktop when we can do it on the web ? Tools are written in JavaScript and run in the browser. Unlike other attempts at creating browser-based development tools, this is not an IDE running in a single tab. Links work and can be shared.  Great care has been taken to provide a web experience for development. There is something called OrionHub  where you can tryout  the current version. While this is still at the very beginning it look very promising.
A few links : 
  • Eclipse Recomenders   
As  frameworks  are big part of today's software development  we need something that can help us easily and simply use them.  Before frameworks can be used efficiently we have to learn their correct usage which often results in high initial training costs for our company and lot of time for us.
Code Recommenders supports developers on learning new APIs by providing tools which learn correct API usages or valuable API usage patterns by analyzing example code and re-integrates this regained knowledge back into your IDE by means of intelligent code completion; extended javadocs ; smart bug detectors, stacktrace search engines and many others...
Although Eclipse currently gives pretty good suggestions on what should appear first on auto-complete and what variable a method should use this project makes everything noticeably better.
Links:
http://www.eclipse.org/recommenders/
Chain Completion Engine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6IIQDMGV58
Template Completion Engine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfG1KnsG4dI
Intelligent Call Completion Engine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM77ItkFT0Q&feature=related

Eclipse at jugmk 
We already have had two presentation directly connected with Eclipse in the past one was about Graphical Editing Framework in eclipse aka GEF by Aleksandar Nikov where he showed powerful  and easy way of creating visual applications using the GEF. This framework enables easy way of working with graphical apps by abstracting the most common  operation one application of this type needs like dragging, dropping, selection, outline  . You just need to worry of your specific business domain and re-use the rest of the services. The platform is entirely open-source like most of the stuff from the Eclipse Foundation, which enables you develop and easilly to package it as your final product.



The other real cool presentation that we had was called  :
See what my IDE can do - Aleksandar Nikov and Saso Lazarevski.  Where basically we had Eclipse vs Netbeans show of that was very awesome and extremely funny. At the end of this presentation we concluded that we are happy to part of the Java community where we have choice.

Also important part of our celebration was the eclipse cake that you can see below as well as other photos from the party.




10 Great years of Eclipse




Other links:
http://eclipse.org/10years/
http://eclipse.org/10birthday/
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_DemoCamps_November_2011

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