Feb 10th, 2007
There is a new useful article at EclipseZone about the differences between Eclipse Extension Registry and OSGi Services. The article describes in general terms some of the strengths and weaknesses of these two models, and makes some suggestions about making a choice.
If you are interested in this topic, read the full article at A Comparison of Eclipse Extensions and OSGi Services.
BTW, seems that the ubiquitous Spring framework and it’s OSGi support has got a lot of attention in the last months, and this article is not an exception.
Feb 10th, 2007
Well, I just finished the work I have been involved during the last month. The task consisted mainly to assemble a RFP document to renew all of our modeling and automatic code generation toolset. Next Monday, we will introduce to some selected providers which are the project objectives and which are the requirements.
Advancing some details, I will tell you that in a first stage we will start designing and developing an infrastructure where all the development tools will rely on. We will also ask to design and develop a tool to model the business logic flow and to automatically generate the code that will execute on a IMS/PL/I/DB2 mainframe environment under a property framework (we call this framework “Application Services Integration”).
The architecture of this framework could be compared to a service oriented architecture (SOA), thought in this case services are coupled, mainly because performance (we have constant peaks of 1.500 tx/s and one requirement is that the response time must be lower than 1 second).
This RFP is our second attempt to renew our development toolset. First attempt, developed under something similar to the MDA paradigm (or should I say DSL as we didn’t use UML?) and based on Eclipse PDE framework plus a metamodel that relies on a central repository database, was a complete failure. I will explain the reasons (a forensic analysis) in another post, although it’s about performance and scalability in a geographically disperse environment.
Why I’m telling you this? Well, because I want to share with you similar experiences. Unfortunately, this kind of experiences are usually hidden “behind the firewall”, and, in my opinion, it’s positive to share these details with others as we can learn about success and failures (as my manager usually says to me, “you always must assume that the rest of the people are cleverer than you”).
Feb 8th, 2007
Josh Staiger and Bill Higgins, members of the IBM Rational Jazz Team, had announced that a new Jazz.net website is now online with some basic information about this project.
Simplicity through consistency. Collaboration in context. Agility through transparency… Jazz is about helping people work together to build software more effectively, while making the software development experience more fun!
Jazz is a joint project between IBM Rational and IBM Research to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for seamlessly integrating tasks across the software life cycle.
While this technology is at an early stage, it is an exciting and important part of Rational’s future.
The website doesn’t contain much information, just a community page with some upcoming events. It seems that people who attend to the Jazz BoF session at EclipseCon 2007 will be eligible to join to a Jazz community pilot.
I will look forward to it, as more details are expected soon.
Feb 8th, 2007
Genuitec has released a new milestone of its Eclipse-based integrated development environment for Java developers: MyEclipse 5.5M1 (GA version 5.5 should be available by end of Q1 2007).
The most notable enhancement is the four new special purpose Windows applications known as simple non-integrated applications (SNAPs).
SNAPs are part of the expanding MyEclipse Fusion Technology suite. SNAPs allow developers to accomplish focused tasks without the weight of an entire IDE. SNAPs can also be used with any other development tool, and therefore free users from the vendor lock-in that is commonly associated with development environments. The current SNAPs available are the Visual HTML/Web Designer, XML Editor, Database Explorer, and Image Editor (including new screen capture capabilities).
Updated February 12th, 2007: Users of NetBeans and Visual Studio are now able to utilize SNAPs directly in their own environment via the MyEclipse “Use-Anywhere” connectors.
Feb 7th, 2007
alphaWorks, the IBM emerging technologies portal, has launched today a new service: QEDWiki.
QEDWiki is “an environment that extends current wiki technology to enable rapid deployment, content aggregation, structured data, and powerful extensibility”.
QEDWiki can be used for a wide variety of Web applications, including, but not limited to, the following:
- Web content management for a typical collection of Wiki pages
- traditional form processing for database-oriented CRUD applications
- document-based collaboration
- rich interactive applications that bind together disparate services
- situational applications (or mash-ups)
Technology community is invited to actively collaborate and participate in the development and direction of this emerging technology, so give it a chance and try it now.
Although if you just want to see a demo, check this YouTube Video where David Barnes explains what is QEDWiki.
