BayArea Eclipse DemoCamp roundup

I am excited to attend the much awaited DemoCamp and meet some Regional Community enthusiasts. Till now 21 got registered for the Regional Community and i am expecting this number to grow; i am sure that Bay Area has more companies working on Eclipse and its just the matter of time.

The DemoCamp started with the demo by Ingres Corporation – A quick tour of the Eclipse Data Tools Platform, which followed by an exciting presentation from Michael Galpin – Eclipse @ eBay.

I gave a presentation + demo on the Single Source; Three Runtimes, which definitely excited many people in the DemoCamp.

Francis Upton gave a nice presentation on the Oakland Software Data Transformer.

Oracle‘s Greg Stachnick gave a presentation and demo of the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. I am definitely going to use this OEPE in future, it has nice WebLogic integration features.

I met Randy Kerber and discussed EMF stuff and experiences. We are yet to find some users for EMF so that we can have some interesting discussions.

Last but not the least, i thank Ingres Corporation for organizing this DemoCamp (, beer and pizza’s too :)) where all Eclipse enthusiasts had an opportunity to share their experiences. Hoping to see more participation from the other Bay Area companies in future.

Happy Eclipse-ing.

Getting ready for my short-talk at EclipseCon 2008

Happy New Year 2008 to everyone. This is my first blog in 2008. Last year ended with some sadness as i lost my backpack containing laptop, camera and some other important belongings in New York airport. I could not trace it till date and i my hopes have been diminishing. It took a little while for me to get a new laptop, prepare it for the daily routine.

Past 1.5 year i have been concentrating on tweaking, customizing and writing plugins for the Web 2.0 frameworks. I was quite successful in providing a good IDE to the IT developers with a good set of code generation features. Thanks to WTP, EMF, Eclipse DnD and in the end Eclipse Platform. In the meantime, i have also encountered with the basic question of “Can Eclipse UI be similar to other widget frameworks out there in Web 2.0 space ?“. I was haunted with this question all the time and probably in Oct 2007, i was ready for an answer. While its not possible to expect a very similar UI in eclipse as in GWT, Dojo, Rico, Zimbra, Flash, etc… , it’s definitely possible to get some-what-close look as in Web 2.0 kind of applications.

I am sharing all my experiences to make an eclipse application to give a look of Web 2.0 application. I thank SWT, JFace  and Nebula to provide such versatile framework. I hope this short-talk would help many of us to have some dangling ideas about how to achieve a “Web 2.0 style widgets and look”.

I am very excited to see you all at eclipse and share my experiences. I would love to see and chat with my previous colleagues Stephan Eberle, Frank Gerhardt, Elias Volanakis and many others.

Web Interactive Design patterns

Most of us are familiar with the Design Patterns on the Desktop and Multi-tire type of applications. With the recent Web 2.0 kind of applications its very important to understand the User Interaction Design Patterns. I got this site from one of my manager and i found it to be very very useful. It has a variety of experiences from the industry experiences and also has great examples.

You can visit http://www.welie.com/index.php.

Is anyone doing Mashup IDEs on Eclipse ?

Gartner predicts that Mashups and Composite Apps is one of the top 10 technologies for 2008. There have been lot of companies embracing the so called bleeding-edge technologies like SOA, RIA, Web2.0, Virtualization, Social Networks and Enterprise Wikis. As these technologies and frameworks are supposed to increase organizations productivity, there is a need to look-into the developer’s productivity too. These days many are happy that you get to choose one in many of the development environments. 

Following are few of the very cool IDEs that i have seen in the area of AJAX, SOA, RIA …

1. Eclipse (WTP, ATF, RAP)
2. MyEclipse
3. Aptana
4. GWT Designer
5. Flex Builder
6. OpenLaszlo IDE
7. JackBe’s Presto
8. Nexaweb
9. BackBase
10. TIBCO General Interface

I am very curious to see anyone coming up with an IDE for Mashups and Composite applications in the Commercial and Open Source area. I am aware that the enterprise Mashups and composite applications is a budding concept. Of course Mashups from Google are there for a while (but these are not the real enterprise Mashups). Recently i have seen few projects like Damia from IBM, PopFly from Microsoft, Wires from JackBe, Kapow and Denodo. These projects do have some sorts for IDEs but none of them apparently have an IDE based on Eclipse.

“Is anyone out there who is doing Mashup IDEs on Eclipse ?”

Go online with RAP 1.0

Rich Ajax Platform(RAP) is a project from Eclipse aims to enable developers to build rich ajax and RIA by using eclipse development model, plugins and java-only apis. Innopract a Germany based company and an eclipse foundation member is the major contributor for this project.

The core of the RAP is a subset of SWT APIs and and some JFace. So over all the widgets available in the SWT and JFace are available to build the RIA. RAP is very similar to RCP, in the way that RCP runs on the desktop and RAP runs on the server. The RAP libraries intelligently renders the UI at the browser with the help of the JavaScript qooxdoo library. RAP lets many of the desktop based RCP applications to be run on the server with little or no changes in the code. Would it not be so cool to have a single code base and be able to have RCP and RIA? It’s very interesting to see the maturity of this project from incubator to 1.0 and all the new and note worthy features.

In the end it definitely competes with the GWT, AIR, Backbase, JackBe, Open Laszlo, etc… in the area of the AJAX Framework and Tools for building the applications. As APIs are based on Java, in this aspect it’s very close to GWT.

All the best to RAP !!!

XML vs JSON !!! Dont compare.

Java Script Object Notation (JSON) has become quite famous since 2006 and it has gone into the major companies application frameworks. JackBe, Google and Yahooare some of the companies that have adopted the JSON in their products. JSON is the response format for many kinds (rss, rest, wsdl, atom, dao, etc…) of the web service responses. Industry has already been talking “If JSON is an alternative to XML”.

I would like to keep the JSON as just a data interchange format. I would not mix up XML and JSON for the data representation and data exchange formats. Following are some differences that i have seen from my own experience…

• XML parsing is very generic, you don’t have to care about the Types. JSON parsing on the other hand is very tricky.
• XML has the data representation and semantics attached to it. JSON is very good for data representation.
• Perhaps JSON data over the HTTP is faster than the XML.
• As a developer the code to parse XML is much cleaner than the code to parse JSON.
• Evaluating the JSON on JS is much faster and efficient. Due to its inherent support on JS, the learning cycle and manipulation of JSON data is faster than manipulation of XML by JS.
• For WEB2.0/RIA applications, where there is frequent data transfers between the browser and server, it makes sense to get the response in JSON and manipulate it in the browser.
• I have used XML as domain models representation. It can contain the cross references, can contain types and attach semantics with the help of Schema.
• JSON does not have any namespaces. I am not sure if this is an added advantage for JSON.
• JSON Does not have validator. Developer is supposed to validate what ever he gets.
• I love the random access XML via XPath. Can i do the same thing in JSON.
• XLink, XQuery are some of the cool things i like on the XML.
• I can represent the entire design of a system as XMI. It has references, schema support, i can validate, etc…

In my view JSON is a great format for the internet/web applications over the browser. Its not the question of XML vs. JSON; Its the question of When XML and When JSON.

At what level do you use eclipse ?

 Eclipse the ubiquitous platform has survived another challenge by releasing the Europa and i am already seeing the # of downloads. Initially it was Java IDE then RCP Platform then Tool Building Platform and now as i know its an eco-system of major frameworks, tools, runtimes and platform which can be extended for ANYTHING an NOTHING in particular. OK, i am not going to define what eclipse does and what not. The scope of my article is to highlight the problems i am solving with eclipse platform.
I have been using eclipse right from 2003 and built tools on Automotive Domain and Ajax&SOA Domain. I have been closely following the other implementations on different verticals. Several OEMs, ISVs, Startups, Universities and individuals have adopted the eclipse “principles” and they know what they are doing soon after they use it. All the content in this article is purely my personal views from my professional experience and do not correlate to any ones opinions dead or alive 😉
What can i do with Eclipse : I would want to start with highlighting the tasks which can be accomplished with eclipse. I am hoping that we will understand the differences between using the eclipse, developing the plugins, making an IDE out of eclipse and eclipse as an integration platform.

Eclipse an IDE : This is what many of us know about the eclipse and what can it do. Its a Java IDE and java developers can create, modify, build the java projects in eclipse. It provides different features like code refactoring (one of the gr8 feature), syntax highlighting, syntax/code checks, code completion, code suggestions, compile, debug, jarring, etc… I have used for an year with out knowing what ELSE can eclipse do. In this use-case we are primarily involved in using the eclipse IDE features as is. I am sure that you are aware of different eclipse language ides like, JDT, CDT, Cobol, PHP editors amongst the most popular ones.
Eclipse Happy User.

Eclipse does Plugins : By this time you know that eclipse can be used to develop plugins and bootstrap in eclipse. Design Plugins in Eclipse -> Develop Plugins in Eclipse -> Test in Eclipse -> Run in Eclipse. A plugin is a logical group of some functionality that in turn can be run in eclipse. If there is no UI part that is associated, it can be used as a simple jar file. In any case its pretty common that we have some UI associated with the plugin. This can be run either on a normal eclipse platform or on a RCP environment.
A simplest plugin you can think of it is a Hello World application (damn…why always HelloWorld). You basically want to contribute an action item to the toolbar of eclipse and on click of that button you want to display a dialog with Hello World Message. Thus in this plugin, you just USEd the eclipse platform to add some functionality your current eclipse runtime.
Basic Plugin Developer.

Eclipse as a Platform :All of us know about the JDT, CDT, PHP language plugins. On this level of platform usage, we as developers are building the different kind of plugins and these they will be used by target audience, who in turn develop some applications with our language kit. Its like one of my colleague had developed Cobol Language toolkit for Fujitsu customer (of course they have released it to open source after some time). In my view i think of the some of the editors like JSF Editor, XML Editors, JSP Editor, JS Editor that fall under this category.
There are many companies that are using the Eclipse as their real time application configuration platform. Its like they have the metadata and the configuration of metadata is a big deal.
Advanced Plugin Developer.

Eclipse an Integration Framework :This is the highest level of integration and complex applications that i have seen with Eclipse. Here i am talking about different usecases. One of the nice example is to be able to create the entire development life cycle of your complex engineering activities in to the eclipse. Starting from System Requirements, Software Requirements, Component Design, Function Design, Coding, Unit Testing, Integration Testing, System Testing, Delivery and finally Issue Tracking into Eclipse. Dont feel apprehensive about the possibility, i am aware of some companies who have done this. This on the ground level means, to integrate different tools [editors, compilers, debuggers, configurators] into eclipse. The integration can be done done on sharing different data models/formats primarily on the EMF models.
Many companies have integrated some AJAX and SOA kind of applications. A typical of these applications would use Platform, WTP, ATF, DTP. The final application could be a RCP application or a plugin distributed via internet/intranet.
I also knew of many Data ETL companies that have started adopting the eclipse as their integration platform of their next generation tooling platform. Many have migrated from their conventional COM/DCOM and Perl based applications to java/eclipse.
Happy Application Integrator.

In the next article i want to highlight the different usecases that are prevailing in the automobile and web 2.0 industries.
In the end you need to know that Eclipse is an ECO System.
You have almost all plugins, tools and frameworks that you want to build/integrate your applications.

Till then Happy Application Integration with Eclipse.