 A Busy Week
My portion of the newsletter this week is somewhat abbreviated since I wasn't on-hand to cover what is probably the biggest Eclipse related event of the year, EclipseCon. Instead, Alex Blewitt provided the highlights in a series of EclipseZone posts which I know I followed with a great deal of interest. Since he was actually at the conference, I left it up to him to craft the recap which I have attached to this newsletter. So instead of reading me drone on and on, you get to see Alex wax poetic about the joys of free wifi and that truly life-giving beverage: coffee (black). On the spot from EclipseCon (Alex Blewitt) EclipseCon has certainly been a whirlwind tour, with many front-page posts on EclipseZone from talks that I've been to. The organisation seems to have worked really well this year; although there weren't as many power sockets as there have been in previous conferences, if you knew where to look it was possible to find a few places to charge up in situ. However, the volume of posts on PlanetEclipse seems to have been less than in previous years; perhaps the lack of power supplies is one possible cause. As usual, there were many different types of talk that you could attend. However, I found that because the conference had been organized as a series of tracks, then the presentations were scheduled as tracks and there was less overlap between topics of related interest (e.g. generally RCP presentations tended not to run at the same time as other RCP presentations; ditto for OSGi). Of course, there are a number of things that you'd like to go to the same time if only you could be in more places at the same time. The conference is also exhausting; for anyone thinking of coming in next year, pace yourself. The late-night BoFs are where you can learn some of the more interesting things about the Eclipse platform, but at least this year they finished by 10pm -- last year, they ran on much later. I suspect that the fact the exhibitors were only showing on two days instead of throughout the conference helped them as well. Although there was logically an open-source area, I didn't see the area populated with demonstrators. I'd be interested in hearing your feedback on the open-source pavilion this year if you saw it. The big news to take away is that OSGi is growing exponentially.
Instead of 'just' being the lowest layer of Eclipse, many people are looking at OSGi on the server side, or for command-line applications, or for building dynamic web applications ... if you've not seen the mini-series on EclipseZone yet, I encourage you to read it. It's going to become much more popular in the future. Of course, that's a message that I've been giving across a lot before, but being at EclipseCon certainly confirms that it's right on the money. Of course, we've also had some big Eclipse Foundation news -- 20% more projects, committers and members than last year's EclipseCon means it's going from strength to strength, as well as the announcement of the AJAX Toolkit Framework and Rich AJAX Platform is showing where Eclipse will be going in the future. More importantly, Oracle has upgraded its membership and will be donating the code behind TopLink as an Eclipse project, which is potentially a very bold move. The Eclipse Foundation is going from strength to strength, and one can only wonder what next year's EclipseCon will be like. Ruby Tool Competition Heating Up (Daniel Spiewak) Ruby, like most dynamic languages, is a surprisingly difficult language to write a solid development tool. In fact, most tools available for Ruby simply provide syntax highlighting and basic indentation. There are a few which provide auto-reformatting, but on the whole the tool scene for dynamic languages is pretty bare. At least, until recently... Recently there has been a major increase in the number of tools available for Ruby development. Microsoft funded a project called "Ruby in Steel" which created a Ruby IDE based on VisualStudio. Not only does this IDE support syntax highlighting and indentation, but it also has more advanced features such as inline documentation and intelli-sense. JetBrains (the creators of the popular Java IDE, IntelliJ) also jumped on the Ruby bandwagon with the creation of a complete development environment for Ruby which runs within IntelliJ IDEA. Even more recently, Tor Norbye committed his work on a NetBeans Ruby/Rails development environment into the NetBeans CVS. Not surprisingly, the toolset is very impressive. In fact, Roman Strobl created a pair of screencasts (demonstrating the new functionality) which probably qualify as the most impressive screencasts I've seen since the famous Matisse demo screencast. Now, for those of you who didn't already know, Eclipse has had its own Ruby development feature set provided through the RDT plugins. These have been around for a very long time, and were the foundation for the RadRails IDE. Not to be outdone by the flurry of activity in the Ruby toolset industry, the RDT team is about to make their 0.9 release which will arguably outdo all of the other development tools and firmly establish Eclipse at the forefront of Ruby IDEs. I'm not going to run through every feature coming in 0.9 in bullet-point fashion, but I do think that one feature in particular is worthy of special note: refactoring. That's right, RDT 0.9 will offer some basic refactorings (such as rename, extract local field, encapsulate field and so on). This is entirely above and beyond anything being offered by competing products (such as the NetBeans Ruby toolset). Hopefully, this will be recognized as the revolutionary feature that it is and bring some much needed attention back to the RDT project. You can discuss this topic further on this thread at EclipseZone.
Until Next Time,
Daniel and Alex
editors@dzone.com
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