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AS OF 7/4/2008 8:33PM EST
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December 1, 2007 —
RESTON, VA. — With the Eclipse Foundation hosting more than 80 projects in the three-and-a-half years of its existence, complexity was bound to be an issue. Two companies discussed software to help Eclipse users navigate through those crowded waters at BZ Media's EclipseWorld Conference held here in early November. BZ Media is the parent company of SD Times.
Just as iPod owners need iTunes to sort through the catalog of music available to them, Eclipse users need a mechanism to sort through the plug-ins available to them, as well as a means to share their findings.
While GOOD Software's Bjorn Gustafsson lamented this development as a sign of the growing complexity of the Eclipse framework, Genuitec, maker of MyEclipse, saw this as an opportunity and at EclipseWorld in early November unveiled Pulse, a platform for creating Eclipse "profiles" that can contain different plug-in configurations.
"Users are having a hard time bringing together things that work, and even knowing what things are out there," said Tim Webb, Genuitec's Pulse product manager. He described Pulse as a rich client application that sits on desktops and includes some profiles that are ready to go. He said in the future, a software catalog for a specific vertical market could be put together, and Pulse could help users create a profile for that market.
CEO Maher Masri also noted that in the future, Pulse could manage licensing and compliance, and it could become a tool for buying software and provisioning it to an entire team.
Meanwhile, a company called Cloudsmith, which launched in mid-November, is offering up a framework for "assembling software directly from the cloud," according to founder and CEO Mitch Sonies. "How do developers respond when components are coming from all over the place, when the codebase is no longer your own?" he asked. Cloudsmith provides a mechanism for mapping to various elements and creating a "virtual distribution" of software.
For instance, Sonies explained that a user could create a map to Apache's Tomcat servlet engine and its Derby database, along with the Eclipse Web Toolkit Project, and Cloudsmith will generate a link to that packaging. "You click on the link and it looks like a download utility. It's a virtual distro. A distro is an assembled thing. But there are no bits on a disk. It's a recipe. The parts are living in the cloud. We just make sure it can build and that it assembles." Distributions can be changed as often as a user would like, he added.
Virtual distributions allow for mass customization of software, Sonies said, noting that Red Hat or JBoss could not create a software distribution for one customer due to economies of scale. With Cloudsmith, Sonies said, users can watch materialization patterns and learn from what the community is doing.
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