IBM is taking the lead role in rolling out an 'OpenAjax' initiative that seems sure to add significant momentum to recent grassroots efforts to bring Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or AJAX, application development to the forefront of the i-technology universe. Open source organizations such as Eclipse and Mozilla are backing the initiative, as are a suite of companies that each bring something unique to this effort.

Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is a runtime platform for delivering your Java applications on multiple platforms. RCP is far more than just a widget toolkit; it is effectively rich client 'middleware' that provides a comprehensive platform for building and deploying applications that are modular, extensible, and updatable.

'This is a very exciting time for Eclipse development in Japan and around the world, and we feel that our partnership will further bolster the rapid growth and adoption of comprehensive Eclipse development tools at a very low cost,' said Maher Masri, president of Genuitec, as it was announced that Genuitec's MyEclipse will expand its customer base into the Japanese application server sector as Hitachi, Ltd. has chosen MyEclipse as a premier partner.

EclipseWorld was recently held in Cambridge, MA, overlooking the Charles River down the road from MIT. The view of the Boston skyline was spectacular and the fresh river air provided a pleasant contrast to the exciting, but marginally breathable, Manhattan atmosphere of last year's event. Next year the event moves to Reston, Virginia.

Backbase has released version 1.2 of its Backbase AJAX Java Edition. Version 1.2 contains significantly extended functionality of the Eclipse WTP plug-in, new UI components, improved client-side validation and extended application server support.

Instantiations announced version 2.0 of RCP Developer, its popular development tool for creating Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) applications. The latest version adds Help Composer and extends Linux support for RCP Packager and WindowTester.

The Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to the implementation of a universal development platform, has announced that it has approved the creation of the Aperi Storage Management Framework Project. The Aperi Project will give customers more choices for deploying open-storage infrastructure software.

The second milestone release (M2) of MyEclipse 5.0 is now available for immediate installation through the 'Development Releases' section of the downloads area of the MyEclipse website. Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX support is available. Please review New and Noteworthy, installation instructions and release notes before download.

Black Duck Software, a provider of software compliance management solutions, has announced that the Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to the implementation of an extensible development platform, has purchased and deployed Black Duck's protexIP/development platform.

In answer to the question 'Where are the high-level Open Source design tools for Java?' I believe that they're emerging from efforts at Eclipse.org. These efforts began with the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) in 2002, and have been building momentum ever since, with the addition of the UML2 project, the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF), the Generative Modeling Tools (GMT) Project, and Model Driven Data Integration (MDDl). More recently, with the creation of the new top-level Eclipse Modeling Project (http:// www.eclipse.org/modeling) to act as a home and focal point for all of these modeling related technologies, there is clearly an ever-growing focus in this area. So what does it all mean and what's behind the acronyms?

Callisto is the simultaneous release of 10 major Eclipse projects at the same time. An important thing to note about Callisto is that even though it's the simultaneous release of 10 projects, it doesn't mean these projects are unified. Each one remains a separate Open Source project operating with its own project leadership, its own committers, and its own development plan. In the end, Callisto is about improving the productivity of developers working on top of Eclipse projects by providing a more transparent and predictable development cycle.

By now, you've probably heard about Eclipse as 'the Open Source Java IDE' (www.eclipse.org). Today, several companies have looked past the Java IDE plug-ins provided as part of Eclipse, and are creating products that use Eclipse as a tool integration platform, both inside and outside of the Java arena. But what about using royalty-free, Open Source Eclipse technology as a general-purpose application framework for your next desktop, fat client, or embedded application? With the support provided by the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and the embedded version of the same (eRCP) the idea is certainly not as strange as it first sounds. So we'll explains why Eclipse is a solid desktop, rich-client, or embedded application framework with the potential to greatly simplify and accelerate development as well as forever change the way developers think about writing Java applications.

The WebLogic-Eclipse plug-in is designed to run the WebLogic Server from the Eclipse IDE. With the WebLogic-Eclipse plug-in, the WebLogic Server gets started and stopped from Eclipse. An application deployed in the WebLogic Server can be debugged from Eclipse with the plug-in. By installing the WebLogic plug-in in Eclipse the WebLogic Server can be configured and administered from the Eclipse IDE by setting the server classpath and JVM options in Eclipse.

Eclipse has emerged as the platform that finally integrates development tools from multiple vendors into a common, extensible, and widely supported framework. The Eclipse CDT development environment brings this rich offering of integrated tools to the world of C and C++ programming, enabling C/C++ developers to improve their productivity and enhance the quality of the software they produce.

Genuitec claims 283,000 registered users, though not all of them are paying customers, in 9,000 companies, 80%-85% of them Global 1000, a lot of their names are listed on the Genuitec web site. And the company is profitable, according to CEO Maher Masri, though how profitable is unclear but it expects to have a million users by the end of next year.

By now, you've probably heard about Eclipse as 'the Open Source Java IDE' (). Today, several companies have looked past the Java IDE plug-ins provided as part of Eclipse, and are creating products that use Eclipse as a tool integration platform, both inside and outside of the Java arena. But what about using royalty-free, Open Source Eclipse technology as a general-purpose application framework for your next desktop, fat client, or embedded application? With the support provided by the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and the embedded version of the same (eRCP) the idea is certainly not as strange as it first sounds. So we'll explains why Eclipse is a solid desktop, rich-client, or embedded application framework with the potential to greatly simplify and accelerate development as well as forever change the way developers think about writing Java applications.

SlickEdit Inc., provider of the code editors, announced the release of SlickEdit Plug-in v3.2 for Eclipse. SlickEdit Inc. is an add-in provider member of the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse Foundation released v3.2 of the Eclipse Platform in June of 2006.

Callisto is the simultaneous release of 10 major Eclipse projects at the same time. An important thing to note about Callisto is that even though it's the simultaneous release of 10 projects, it doesn't mean these projects are unified. Each one remains a separate Open Source project operating with its own project leadership, its own committers, and its own development plan. In the end, Callisto is about improving the productivity of developers working on top of Eclipse projects by providing a more transparent and predictable development cycle.

Eclipse RCP is a very important strategy and future for us. We are seeing a lot of uptake, in particular ISVs, from organizations adopting RCP as the platform for building their next-generation products. That being said, Eclipse as a community is focused on a number of different areas including providing innovative solutions for enterprise Java developers.

After getting a head of gray hairs and a quickly receding hairline, I have learned that the simplest solutions are often the best. Having worked with Java since 1995 and various software development lifecycle methodologies over the years, I have seen things grow complex in these areas. Thanks to some new lighter-weight Java tools and agile methods, I can provide a fresh perspective on developing Java applications in an agile manner.

'There are some important improvements to infrastructure (with BEA Workshop 3.2),' writes BEA VP Bill Roth in a recent blog entry. 'Libraries for Hibernate, Kodo, Spring and Struts are downloaded on first use. This means that you do not have to agree to licenses for these features unless and until you choose to use them in a project.'

The Eclipse Foundation announced the release of 10 Eclipse open source projects. This release event, named Callisto, is one of the largest multi-project releases undertaken by an open source community.

I'm pleased to announce that WTP 1.5 shipped on schedule on June 30 as part of the Eclipse 3.2 Callisto simultaneous release. WTP is part of this ten project mega-release, a first for the Eclipse Foundation, and a sign of things to come. As the Eclipse family of projects becomes more horizontally integrated it will be crucial to have all the parts developed on a coordinated schedule and released together.

Dan Roberts, Director of Developer Tools at Sun Microsystems, discussed the company's recent decision to join the IBM-led OpenAJAX Alliance, in an exclusive SYS-CON interview. He was joined by Sun AJAX Architect Greg Murray in the interview, who discussed the importance of interoperability within the Alliance membership.

Motorola and the Eclipse Foundation, an open source community focused on providing a universal development platform, announced that Motorola has joined Eclipse as a Strategic Developer Member. As part of this commitment, Motorola will hold a seat on the Board of Directors and participate in the Architecture, Requirements, and Planning Councils of the Eclipse Foundation.

Metallect Corporation today announced the availability of a Metallect IQ Server plug-in for the Eclipse Platform. Developers working within Eclipse can now conduct impact analysis and dependency mapping of application logic across all applications and supporting databases with integrated access to IQ Server.

The Eclipse runtime underwent a paradigm change in the transition from version 2.1 to 3.0. The OSGi framework specification R3.0 was implemented. Parts of the Public API have changed in version 3.0. Version 3.0 contains a compatibility layer to give plug-ins written for the 2.1 API the ability to run. However, for better performance and extra functionality it is strongly recommended that makers of plug-ins wean themselves as soon as possible from dependency on the compatibility layer.

Fortify Software, Inc., a leading provider of security products that help companies identify, manage and remediate software vulnerabilities to mitigate enterprise security risk, today announced that Fortify has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider.

While there I had the great pleasure of spending some time with Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse and Mike Taylor from Instations doing a webcast. They just released a new product RCP Developer and we spent some time talking about that and the advantages of the RCP.

'Java-driven code quality' was the topic of discussion during a recent SYS-CON.TV Power Panel discussion held at the Reuters studio overlooking Times Square in New York. Moderated by SYS-CON Publishing Director Jeremy Geelan, the panel featured industry analyst Judith Hurwitz of Hurwitz and Associates, Enerjy Software CEO Nigel Cheshire, Instantiations CEO Mike Taylor, Mark Lambert from Parasoft, and Barry Mullan from Agitar Software.

A project to enable developers to build AJAX-enabled Web applications using Eclipse technology has been proposed by Innoopract. The Proposal for Rich AJAX Platform (RAP), currently is in the review stage at Eclipse.org.

Eclipse thought-leaders Mike Taylor and Mike Milinkovich will discuss a new approach to building desktop and rich client applications in Java, offer rationale for using Eclipse RCP to create high performance cross-platform clients and describe how a combination of Eclipse RCP and emerging development tools can help organizations bring Java back to the desktop to effectively work for them.

The AJAX Tooling Framework (ATF) project passed its creation review and is now being incubated inside the BEA-lead Web Tools Platform (WTP) project at Eclipse. ATP is a new collection of Eclipse-based technologies designed to make it easier to develop rich Internet applications based on AJAX.

Centric CRM has been named a Platinum sponsor of the first-ever Enterprise Open Source Conference. To be held in New York city June 5-6, the conference focuses on the incredible interest in open source solutions to critical business challenges now being shown by large corporations.

Flex 2 is a good technology for development of rich Internet applications, and Adobe is already making some serious changes in the pricing policy to bring Flex 2 to masses. But to make it attractive to five million of professional Java developers they should offer Eclipse-based Flex Builder IDE for free.

I'm in SF on the ground heading out to NetBeans day. I'll post my general impressions once there. I also have some stuff to do with the JCP. Should be interesting. I was just reviewing the session and there is as usual way too much to see but I'm going to get a change to hang out with old friends (Chris and Kevin and a couple of others) which is half the reason to come here anyway...

Sybase WorkSpace seamlessly combines data development, Web applications, services-oriented development of application (SODA) and mobile development with enterprise modeling. New functionality in Sybase WorkSpace 1.5 includes a Web application development component, increased support for database development and industry-leading packaging and licensing.

Tons of interesting stuff came from today's NetBeans shindig. I am impressed with the progress they have made in just a year. The tool set is a lot better and seems to be making significant progress on the way to being a first class player. Yet another reason to be glad for Eclipse. The Eclipse team has really forced the issue to make NetBeans better. One of my favorite quotes last year from a NetBeans/Swing guy was that they didn't realize how important native look and feel was to developers (and ultimately users). They have a much better story for that now, particularly on the performance side of things. It runs fast (especially on my shiny new 17' MacBook Pro:).

JackBe at JavaOne announced support for two key industry initiatives that strengthen its position as a leading provider of enterprise-class AJAX solutions.The company said its AJAX development solution, the JackBe NQ Suite, will support the Eclipse development platform, enabling developers using JackBe's suite to work within their environment of choice.

Borland released an upgraded version of Borland SilkTest, the enterprise-class functional testing product recently added to Borland's Application Lifecycle Management portfolio through the acquisition of Segue Software. SilkTest 8.0 offers new features designed to help organizations optimize the quality of software by streamlining and automating testing efforts. It also adds support for testing Eclipse-based applications and those applications running on the latest Internet browser and Microsoft .NET 2.0 environments.