//extrabright

I am at the moment in Ludwigsburg, which is in the Stuttgart’s area, in Germany, for the annual Eclipse Summit 2007. This is actually a quite interesting conference in the effervescent and mainly open source field of Eclipse. Lots of different projects around the mother project Eclipse are being presented. There are actually lots of interactions between them. Check the Eclipse Summit page for more information as well as a live cast and the slides regarding the talks.

A little summary of some interesting projects seen today:

• Erich Gamma presenting the Jazz project. A collaborative development environment. It provides a number of tools, which are integrated together, to enable a better collaboration in software development. I am seeing this a bit like a web 2.0 touch to software engineering, where the different developers have the opportunity to follow in real time the development of the whole tool: chat together using instant messenging, see a distributed task list of the project, send by drag and drop references to bugs or defects, see who is online at the moment to be able to address a given problem with that person directly, etc. The application is unfortunately not open source, but is of course based on Eclipse RCP.
• An update regarding the Equinox or OSGI framework, which is an underlying framework and architecture on which Eclipse is based from the version 3.0.
• An AJAX framework called RAP. This project aims at providing a target platform for deploying existing SWT applications, as AJAX apps, providing API’s (mostly) compatible with SWT. RAP or the RWT framework, as it is called, is in fact a subset of the SWT API’s. An application using the RWT target platform will be automatically translated into a web application upon execution, including javascript handling of the user events. It seems like a great idea to have a unique code base for an application, using either SWT or RWT depending on the deployment type. Although I am wondering how a seemless integration of the RAP application within the browser can take place: for the moment, the RAP application will have for instance its own windows, within the browser window, which I don’t find very nice. But in any case, a project to keep an eye on.
• An update regarding JDT. I know I had read it in the release notes when Eclipse 3.3 was released, but I re-discovered the CTRL + 3 (Command + 3 on a Mac) shortcut. It does basically the same than Quicksilver or Spotlight on a Mac, just within Eclipse. Typing a short text, it does a search among all possible operations applicable to the situation. A great way to save time when launching operations (e.g. show the error log view or do a code cleanup).
• GUIDancer: I find this name funny. This application basically enables to run tests of GUI based applications, at the moment just using Swing, although the version 2.0, which should be release to the end of the year, should support SWT and Web applications as well. A good complement to Unit Testing.

I will try to charge my laptop battery until tomorrow, so that I can give an update of the second day.

@Edit. I forgot to mention the EMF Compare project:

• EMF Compare is a project started exactly one year ago at Eclipse Summit 2006. The aim was to privide model comparison capabilities, which were lacking at the time. One year later, a working prototype has been implemented. This enables, when using EMF for Model Driven Architecture, to be able to compare graphically two models, useful for instance when merging back to Subversion or CVS a modified version of a model. This project can be also used to compare graphically different XML files.