Eclipse Plug-in Central (EPIC) makes it easier than ever for developers, software vendors and enterprises to find high quality open source and commercial plug-ins, tools and add-on services to enhance their Eclipse development.

XAware's new enhances the XAware Business Services XCelerator (BSX) family of pre-packaged solutions for common industry integrations for federating and enriching data in highly re-usable business services, the company reports.

Eclipse 3.2 RC1 is out! Author and software consultant R. J. Lorimer comments: 'Things are certainly slowing down in the realm of 'new features', but now things start to look really shiny and pretty for the upcoming final drop.'

About a year ago, when I wrote an article on Dreamweaver, I used half of Dreamweaver and half of Homesite. Today, as I write this, half my development is done in CFEclipse and the other half in Dreamweaver. Unfortunately I used Dreamweaver as a really advanced text editor, something it's not that great at. CFEclipse seemed like the obvious alternative so I got it installed and I'm slowly learning its power. The learning curve for CFEclipse has been steep, since, coming from Dreamweaver, its interface is counterintuitive. Assuming that other people are having the same problem, I thought I'd share my thoughts.

NextApp has announced the availability of the open-source AJAX-based Echo2 Web Framework and commercially-licensed EchoStudio2 Visual Development Tool. Echo2 unifies AJAX technology with a practical server-side framework to create a next-generation web application platform. For web application developers, Echo2 provides a familiar and powerful component-oriented framework that promotes event-oriented design similar to traditional thick-client user interface toolkits like Java Swing or Eclipse SWT. Echo2 leverages AJAX technology to deliver rich internet applications that create a user experience normally reserved for desktop-based applications.

With Eclipse Project 3.2 slated for official announcement in June, executive director Mike Milinkovich is optimistic about recent growth of the foundation, its updated ALF project, and the potential of Rich Client Platform technology.

CoWare Virtual Platform product family delivers new tools and technologies that support the creation, distribution, and use of virtual hardware platforms for device software development and validation. Virtual hardware platforms are models of the device hardware and the environment they evolve in, and are suitable for the development and validation of an entire device software stack up to the application level, the company says.

I'm the 'tech chair' of SYS-CON's 10th annual SOA and WebServices conference that will take place on June 5-6 in New York City. Last week I've invited Joel Spolsky to make a keynote speech at this event. Guess what, Joel has accepted my invitation! If you have a chance to attend this talk, you won't regret it. Joel is one of the most respected people in the software industry. He is a brilliant writer and speaker. Try not to miss this opportunity.

Unlike last year's event, there was no keynote speaker from Sun. Nevertheless, Sun's presence was noticed last week at the Santa Clara Convention Center. I'd like to mention a few high and low points here.

Eclipse Forum Europe offers topics such as Eclipse Core and RCP, Development, ALM, Model Driven Development, Eclipse know-how and Project Parade, presented by numerous internationally accredited experts, consultants, authors and groundbreakers of the Eclipse community.

The Eclipse Foundation kicked off its third annual EclipseCon 2006 user conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif. This year's show is the largest gathering yet of the vibrant and active Eclipse community. The conference has attracted 46 exhibitors and 10 open source projects and features over 140 technical sessions. Industry keynotes will be delivered by luminaries such as Borland CEO Tod Nielsen, Greg Stein of Apache Software Foundation, Joel Spolsky of the popular 'Joel on Software' site and Eclipse's own Director of Committer Community Development and wiki founder Ward Cunningham.

Compuware Corporation and the Eclipse Foundation today announced the creation of the Tools Services Framework (Corona) Project, to be led by Compuware. The creation of Project Corona comes less than six months after Compuware officially joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Member.

Individual and company award winners were announced at EclipseCon, being held in Santa Clara, CA. Categories this year include Top Ambassador, RCP Applications, and Tools.

SYS-CON Events (www.event s.sys-con.com)announced today the first international 'AjaxWorld (TM) Conference & Expo'(w ww.ajaxworldconference.co m) to take place on October 2-3, 2006, in SanFrancisco, California. The announcement came during the opening day of the'Real-World AJAX' seminar (www.ajaxseminar.com) taking place today at theMarriott Marquis Times Square Grand Ballroom. Today's first event in the'Real-World AJAX' education series was sold out with close to 400 delegatesamong the live studio audience and more than 10,000 simulcast viewers onSYS-CON.TV. The event was originally planned for 200 delegates.

A few months ago I stumbled on an IDE named Aptana and I instantly recognized that it was the perfect IDE for developers who have found it difficult to convert to CFEclipse. And why is it such a great replacement? For starters Aptana is actually based on Eclipse. That means it has all the great features that you've heard of about Eclipse, including the ability to use the CFEclipse plug-in with it.

JasperSoft Corporation, the market leader in open source business intelligence, today launched iReport Plug-in for Eclipse, a graphical report designer that lets developers using Eclipse quickly add sophisticated reports to their applications. JasperSoft's new Eclipse plug-in, as well as the iReport designer application and the JasperReports reporting libraries are all freely available for download and use under open source licenses. This is the first integration of Eclipse with JasperSoft's open source BI products, which have been downloaded more than 1.7 million times.

After a year of development, Mylar 1.0, a task-focused development plugin for Eclipse, has been released. Eclipse 3.3M4 release will be supported by Mylar 1.0.1 on Dec 22nd. The Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to the implementation of a universal software development platform, has announced the release of Eclipse Mylar 1.0.

Today's trend is to integrate existing systems in a standard way to make disparate implementations interoperate. Web Services and XML came along with the ability to provide a standard communication interface between these systems, as well as the standard description language - WSDL - the Web Services Description Language that lets those systems define the structure of the services they're providing.

Active Endpoints has announced that the ActiveBPEL Designer (formerly ActiveWebflow Professional) will now be available for free download from the Active Endpoints website as well as for free redistribution by other organizations. ActiveBPEL Designer is a comprehensive Eclipse Ready BPEL authoring environment.

ULC Visual Editor 5.0 for Eclipse 3.1 is now available for download from the Canoo website. This new release is the first version that runs with Eclipse 3.1 and the Eclipse Visual Editor 1.1. Porting to Eclipse 3.1 has greatly improved the overall performance and stability of the tool. Use this editor to visually compose Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Ok, I've been following the hype and speculation about Oracle buying JBoss but the latest bit that I read on Business Week really got my dander up. It's not the article from BW that was irritating at all it was the comment by some one claiming to be 'Siddharth Gulhati'. I don't know Sid but his comment is over the top for me.

Choreography is the dark continent of Web services: few onlookers have traveled there, and many question whether there are any riches to be brought home from the trip. In the first place, choreographies bear such a striking resemblance to business processes that the novice might think that the two types of artifacts are indistinguishable.

Exadel, Inc. announced AJAX support through its new version of Exadel Studio 3.5. Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or AJAX, is a Web development technique for creating interactive Web applications, that is gaining widespread attention from the development community. Because AJAX applications inevitably involve running complex JavaScript code on the client, developers need tools and frameworks that help with efficiency and accuracy.

CFEclipse is a community project that builds on the open source Eclipse framework to deliver expert, code-centric developers a new option for ColdFusion development. This article explains what CFEclipse is, gives a bit of the project history, shows off some key features, and explains how you can get involved.

The Apache Woden project is a reference implementation of the W3C WSDL 2.0 specification which is now a Candidate Recommendation. The project is looking for help so here's a great opportunity for Java developers to contribute to the advancement of a major new Web Services standard. Here's the news annoucement.

A J2EE application deployed in the WebLogic server may be debugged in the Eclipse IDE with the remote debugger provided by Eclipse. Without a debugger the error message has to be obtained from the application server error log to debug the application.

Lattix, Inc., the provider of innovative software architecture management solutions, today announced the immediate availability of Lattix LDM for Eclipse as part of the new 2.5 version of Lattix LDM. With this new Eclipse plugin, Lattix further extends the developers' capabilities to visualize and maintain the architecture during application development by delivering the power of Lightweight Dependency Models (LDM) to formalize, communicate and control the architecture of Eclipse projects.

ILOG JViews 8.0, the latest version is now shipping. The newest release of the ILOG JViews is the most complete suite of products that addresses all aspects of advanced visualization, including: Key visual components: Diagrams, BPM, Dashboards, Maps, Charts, Gantt charts, Automatic Layout. All kinds of deployment techniques, including: desktop clients, AJAX-enhanced web applications, Eclipse RCP, and Portals. A proven track record with users in the most demanding industries: IT, Telecommunications, Transportation, Utilities, Energy, Defense

We'll build a servlet that will demo some new Java 5.0 features and do some basic tasks like creating a session to track user visits to multiple Web pages. This code can easily be extended to store a user ID in the session that will travel with her as the site is navigated. The value of the visit counter is stored in the session so multiple visits to the page will be counted (this includes the page refreshes after pressing the browser's 'Reload' button). If the counter goes over five, the counter gets cleared.

Annotation is a new Java language feature introduced in JDK 5.0. It has quickly become one of the most popular, and yet most controversial, language feature in core Java. New Java frameworks, such as EJB 3.0 and Hibernate 3.0, make extensive use of annotations to eliminate the excessive XML configuration files (a.k.a. the 'XML hell' in Java EE). Those annotations significantly reduce the amount of code and configuration data, and simplify the overall architecture, making application development easier. At the same time, enterprise architecture purists are complaining that annotations corrupt the separation between code and configuration, reduce the overall level of abstraction, and create more coupling between code and external frameworks.

'Our goal at the Eclipse Foundation has been to foster an open-source community that responds to the needs of commercial vendors and serves as a platform for innovation,' said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. 'The endorsement of Eclipse by Lattix will further extend the capabilities of Eclipse developers to visualize and maintain the architecture during application development.'

Nokia and the Eclipse Foundation today announced that Nokia has joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer and Board member. Nokia will support the work of the Eclipse open source community by contributing software and developers to a proposed new Eclipse project.

Compuware Corporation today announced at its OJ.X conference that the company has made a strategic, long-term commitment to the Eclipse Foundation by becoming an Eclipse Strategic Developer. As part of this commitment, Compuware will focus its efforts on application life cycle integration and tool interoperability and dedicate resources to the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) project. Compuware's move sends a strong signal of support to the initiative aimed at making life cycle integration a key part of Eclipse's future. By creating an industry standard for tool interoperability, Compuware seeks to help customers cost-effectively improve the delivery of applications across the life cycle.

Palamida announced alliances with two major open source organizations, Eclipse Foundation, Inc. and SourceForge.net. In addition to extending the reach of its software intellectual property compliance solution, IP Amplifier, the new relationships will also ease open source developers' concerns about the utilization of their custom-created intellectual property, and allow organizations to be more confident in their use of open source software.

AccuRev has announced it has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In-Provider to further its support and influence on open source standards within the software configuration management (SCM) industry.

The bits for WTP 1.0 were baked last Friday and are cooling off now in preparation for their 'official' release on 2005-12-23. However, if you have a pair of oven mitts handy, feel free to download it now and munch this tasty snack over your Holiday break. Unless we discover some late-breaking show-stopper, the bits you'll get are actually RC5 which, as the name suggests, was our fifth attempt to produce a result that was worthy of vendor adoption.

The Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to implementation of a universal development platform, will make the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) 1.0 release generally available the week of Dec 19th, 2005. Eclipse WTP 1.0 is an extensible, standards-based tool platform for developing J2EE and Web applications. WTP has already been adopted by the leading J2EE suppliers, including BEA, Borland, IBM, JBoss and ObjectWeb. This full version release solidifies the platform API for 3rd party extension, and accompanying major documentation improvements make WTP ready for the next-level of vendor adoption.

The Eclipse Foundation will make the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) 1.0 release generally available the week of Dec 19th, 2005.

MyEclipse is based upon and significantly extends Eclipse 3.1 to include support for UML, XML, HTML, Struts, JSF, JSPT, JavaScriptT, CSS, EJB, Tapestry, Hibernate, Spring and database/SQL/ERD technologies.

Cape Clear's most recent product release provides a tooling environment for the end-to-end development of service oriented architectures (SOA) that is completely unified within the Eclipse environment. As a plug-in member of the Eclipse Foundation, Cape Clear will continue to build tools that extend the usefulness and reach of the Eclipse platform. Cape Clear intends to work with Eclipse open source initiatives to contribute new capabilities for a range of Eclipse activities, including the Eclipse Web Tools Platform, an Eclipse project conceived to simplify the development of Web-centric applications.