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AS OF 7/4/2008 8:25PM EST
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What's Cooking at Eclipse
Before the Europa release is fit for consumption, several tasty dishes will be golden brown and ready to serve
By Edward J. Correia
October 15, 2006 —
It’s official: The next Eclipse simultaneous release will be called Europa, continuing the Jovian moon pattern established with Callisto. But with Europa’s launch date still more than half a year away, several important projects are expected to arrive hot from the oven before Europa hits the table in mid-2007.
 Among the most far-reaching and broadly appealing of those soon-to-be-released Eclipse projects is Mylar, a plug-in that can increase developer productivity by managing and filtering tasks based on context.
“Developers waste a tremendous amount of time scrolling, navigating and parsing information instead of getting work done,” said project lead Mik Kersten, a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia. The familiar Eclipse Package Explorer can contain tens of thousands of elements for even a small enterprise application, which he said results in information overload.
Mylar introduces context management and task management facilities to Eclipse, permitting tasks to be stored in a repository as objects. “When working with a fully integrated connector, you can rely purely on Mylar for working with that repository. Everything you can do in Bugzilla, you can now do in Eclipse,” he said, for example. Mylar also will support Trac and JIRA issue trackers. “Rudimentary support for Google Code, SourceForge and gforce” repositories also will be delivered with 1.0, he said, including the ability to plan, save, query and edit tasks through the Eclipse embedded browser.
Adding a form of filtering to the Package Explorer, context management monitors a developer’s interactions within Eclipse and automatically identifies information relevant to the task at hand, according to its documentation. Using that data—which can include a developer’s access to methods, APIs, documents and other artifacts—the tool focuses Eclipse views and editors to show only relevant information. “The more you use Mylar, the more productive you become,” Kersten said.
Mylar also contains a rich editor capable of drag-and-drop attachments and offline editing. Integrated change notifications allow developers to use Mylar’s task list as an inbox instead of an e-mail client.
Mylar 1.0 is set to debut in early December.
 The Eclipse Process Framework project’s aim is to provide developers with a starting point for the creation of development best practices. Intended for all aspects of the job, the tool includes guidance for requirements authoring, maintenance and publication of methods and processes, and for library management.
The project’s team, led by IBM’s Per Kroll, at press time was finishing work on its two main components: EPF Composer and OpenUP. The tooling component, EPF Composer, lets developers pick and choose the process components from which to deploy and generate project maps. The tool can import and export XML to facilitate exchange of information with other environments. An API also permits extension to the environment. “You’re not forced to use the tool we built; you can use it as an extensible framework to capture a process from scratch or import one.”
EPF will include OpenUP, the Open Unified Process, which Kroll described as “a very light process that covers a complete life cycle of a project from start to end.” It also gives developers the ability to “capture requirements, develop and manage code and manage all other aspects of a project.” Also extensible, OpenUP is now at version 0.9.
Future editions will include Extreme Processing and Scrum. “All kinds of processes can be produced using EPF,” he said. “We’re working on an XP process; you should see that in the next couple of months.”
Still, Kroll believes that OpenUP, which is intended for any organization developing software, can be useful as is. “Most will use it as a tool. But it has an API for the framework, and after a few projects some will modify it” to suit their own processes. He added, though, that the unmodified environment is not particularly well suited for large-scale development or for companies adhering to compliance issues. “We don’t provide specific guidance for that, so a company would have to extend it themselves.”
Eclipse Process Framework 1.0 was set for release on Sept. 30.
 The Device Software Development Platform project, introduced early last year by embedded giant Wind River Systems, has gained tremendous interest and momentum. Three of its six subprojects—Target Management (TM), embedded RCP (eRCP) and Mobile Tools for Java (MTJ)—will release 1.0 versions this year. Device Debugging and Native App Builder are on the Europa timetable; Tools for Mobile Linux was still in the proposal stage at press time.
The TM project, which is led by Wind River’s Martin Oberhuber and IBM’s David Dykstal, gives Eclipse an interface for controlling remote devices and accessing its processes with remote shell. Developers can search for and edit files, and launch applications and test scripts. “It uses whatever services are registered with the framework [and is] optimized for as little data transfer as possible,” said Oberhuber.
Version 1.0 also will include an early version of Service Discovery, which scans a network for devices and services offered. “We are already providing it with the download, but it’s labeled as experimental,” Oberhuber said, adding that the feature is expected to be considered stable by version 1.1.
Also left for version 1.1 will be the ability to store user actions for later execution. “If you found yourself doing the same things on a remote system like running a compiler, you can set a user action for that and also share it with others.” A future edition might also include import and export capability, which would extend the copy/paste method in use now for uploading and downloading files. “Import will allow you to synchronize the local file system with a remote file system. But these plans are not signed off by everybody—it’s still a proposal,” he said.
Although the Target Management project includes a framework, Oberhuber said the tools would be useful to many people without modification. “They can use the tools out of the box on any Unix or Linux computer,” he said. “But in the embedded space, you typically have proprietary protocols, so they would use the framework to [modify accordingly].”
Target Management 1.0 is set for release on Oct. 20.
 For device-minded UI developers looking for an alternative to MIDP 2.0, the DSDP’s embedded RCP might be worth a look.
On Sept. 22 the team, led by IBM’s Chris Aniszczyk and Mark Rogalski, released a runtime framework for installing and managing Java plug-ins on devices, allowing them to share services and a common JVM. “This is a big improvement over MIDP 2.0,” claimed Rogalski, “in which only applications in the same ‘suite’ can share common services.”
With eRCP, Rogalski said the Eclipse and OSGi underpinnings provide the features of a plug-in architecture and a widget-based API. “Developers can now use their existing experience and knowledge of writing Eclipse plug-ins to write embedded [and] mobile applications. “This is the next step up from MIDP 2.0, which he said has had limited widget capabilities. The eRCP tools include a stable set of “rich widgets” for devices running Nokia’s Series 80, Windows and Windows Mobile 2003 and 2005.
Support for Nokia’s S60 and Trolltech’s QT Embedded interfaces is planned for July 2007.
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