Kudos to the Eclipse Galileo Developers!

When 40% of all the commercial projects are failing due to one or the other reasons, the technique and style of the eclipse developers have successfully delivered one more annual release of Eclipse Galileo. This is one of the modern wonders. Nothing more than a set of 'strong minds' are required for this kind of achievement.

Any great idea can be spoiled by a careless mind. The same way, any small idea can be turned to a master piece by a great mind. The story of two magicians which wouldn't bring much excitement, when it got into the hands of a director like Christopher Nolan; it turned out to be one of my favourite movie and greatest hits. If you haven't watched the movie 'The Prestige', I urge you to watch it as soon as possible.

The enthusiasm and vibrancy of the hundreds of minds in the Eclipse community, the electric current generated by their thoughts; these are still attracting lot of new people to the community. Framework projects, RnD projects, graphical projecs, modelling projects, bio projects ....

There were many arguments last year. The complexity of some of the frameworks, the simplicity of some of the tools; the anger towards some of the eclipse processes; the sadness when the expected features had to be dropped out of the final delivery, the happiness when the customer/end user said '"See this new feature, Wow'".

Lot of emotions and lot of memories. The emotions which starts in the brain of a single person, when backed by the support of a highly motivated community results in successes similar to what happens in our Eclipse community.

Open source is not a charity always. Hundreds of businesses are thriving upon the open source model. When one of the basic values of humans is followed, ie, 'give and then take'; it results in success and content feeling. When we are following our values, when we are backed by a community with the same set of values, we are at our best.

Many team members were flexing their brain muscles for a long time. Then one of them said on 24th of June, "Guys, we are done for the year"; Its time to relax and celebrate now. Some celebrate the success over a cup of coffee, some over the dance floor and some with a vacation trip.

Life goes on; Eclipse goes on; Next year e4 is one of the most anticipated outputs from the community.

I dedicate this blog to all those gurus who developed the basic eclipse framework and donated it to the open source community; to those who still develop new frameworks in the open source; You people dared to go to the wild, never knowing the dangers behind the hidden rocks and trees, you cleared the path for the rest of us.

I like to convey my gratitude to the hardwork of the hundreds of developers who has worked towards the success of galileo, "Dudes, you all have done a great job. You guys are making our jobs easier".

How can this kind of success be repeated in the high percentage of failing commericial projects?

You need to think out of the bondaries of your organizations, you need to come out of your conventional thoughts, you need to use your brain for what it is designed. "Share" and put some thought behind it, you will start to get the returns. As Robert C Martin says, don't sprint, run the marathon. When your muscles get tired and gets deprived of energy, its your mind which needs to give strength. If the mind losses focus, then the body will fail, our actions become meaningless and the projects fail.

Focus on what you need to achieve. Put your mind and body for it. The results will follow. Its all a mind game. You are a reflection of your mind!

madhu

Eclipse Galileo - A quick glance!

"I think there is a world market of may be 5 computers",
by Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943.

Today computers are ruling the world. Who ever opted out of open source projects, wait and see on 24th of June, 2009. Around 50 projects are rolling out under the umbrella of Eclipse Galileo.

You had read it correctly. Its a half a century of projects on the release train waiting for the users to roll on.

Most of the tools required from the inception to the delivery of software projects are included.

You can draw UML diagrams, you can generate code, you can create workflows, you can generate parsers and models with a few lines of grammar.

And all these are totally free.

Lets have a quick glance of some of the new projects offered in galileo

TMF Xtext

Using Xtext you can generate your own text editor for your domain specific language. You can provide all the cool features like content assist, syntax coloring, outline view etc.

You do not need to spend late nights to write your own parser again. You do not need to design your own model. Xtext will generate a parser and model for you. What you need to do is to tell Xtext what it should do for you using a set of grammar files.

For more information you can check at http://xtext.org/

PHP Development Tools (PDT)

This is one of the main attractions of Galileo release - an IDE for the development of PHP projects. The existing features of WTP (web tools platform) and DLTK (Dynamic languages toolkit) are leveraged to develop a great IDE for the PHP developers.

Rush to http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/ to catch up with the show.

Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF)

ACTF is a framework that will help developers to create functionalities which will enhance the accessibility of applications and content for people with disability.

You can find more details at http://www.eclipse.org/actf/

Eclipse Persistence Services Project (EclipseLink)

EclipseLink is a comprehensive open source persistence solution. EclipseLink has evolved from Oracle's TopLink product. This project brings around 12 years of commercial experience from Oracle's developers to the opensource community.

The eclipselink services include Object-Relational with EclipseLink JPA, Object-XML Binding with EclipseLink MOXy, Service Data Objects with EclipseLink SDO and Web Services for RDBMS with EclipseLink DBWS.

For more details, please goto http://eclipse.org/eclipselink/

Java Workflow Tooling (JWT)

JWT helps you to build your own workflows for your requirement, design and development time needs.

You can find the snapshots and more details at http://www.eclipse.org/jwt/

EMFT > MWE (Modeling Workflow Engine )

With MWE you can describe and execute workflows.The MWE is an extensible framework for the integration and orchestration of model processing workflows.

Check at http://wiki.eclipse.org/Modeling_Workflow_Engine_(MWE) for more details.


Memory Analyzer ( MAT)

Now you can find memory leaks and unnecessary memory consumption of your java projects using MAT. You can create reports to analyse the memory leak suspects.

Goto http://www.eclipse.org/mat/ to find more details.

Acceleo

Acceleo is part of the EMF 'Model to Text' projects. Based on the philosophy of MDA, it helps to generate code from your model.

Check http://wiki.eclipse.org/Acceleo

Xpand

One more candidate from EMF 'Model To Text' projects. The aim of this project is ... you guessed it. This is a language that is used for code generation based on EMF models.

You can find the details at http://wiki.eclipse.org/Xpand

To see the other existing M2T (Model to text) projects you can check at http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/m2t/


Riena

This is a platform for building multi-tier enterprise applications based on the RCP (Rich Client Platform). Riena broadens the usage of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) of OSGi/Equinox technology.

Riena user interface components will support a business process oriented user interface for visualization and navigation needs.

For more details, http://www.eclipse.org/riena/

Sword Fish

Sword Fish is an extensible SOA framework based on Eclipse Equinox technology.

You can find more details at http://www.eclipse.org/swordfish/learn/learn.php


What we saw till now are just the tip of the iceberg. There are lots and lots of features in all the existing eclipse projects which are running for the last couple or more years.

You can find the details of the other galileo projects at http://wiki.eclipse.org/Galileo#Projects

madhu

Free minds lead to innovation!

Today my wife tricked me to wash a bundle of extra plates :O. She had an innovative plan to trap me. Anyway, am not in a position to reveal the plan.

Innovation is quite an interesting topic to speak on. We saw Dave's and Doug's blogs in the last couple of days.

Every idea springs from the mind of a single person. This idea can grow to a group of people who can add value to the initial root idea.

I felt it is apt to share Jiddu Krishnamurthy's view on innovation.

"Conformity leads to mediocrity. To be different from the group or to resist environment is not easy and is often risky as long as we worship success.

The urge to be successful, which is the pursuit of reward, the search for inward or outward security, the desire for comfort - this whole process smothers discontent, puts an end to spontaneity and breeds fear; and fear blocks the intelligent understanding of life.

In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion.

This fear of life, this fear of struggle and of new experience, kills in us the spirit of adventure; our whole upbringing and education have made us afraid to be different from our neighbour, afraid to think contrary to the established pattern of society, falsely respectful of authority and tradition."

Lack of fear means a free mind. A free mind can think without boundaries. New thoughts leads to innovation. And lots of innovations will keep us engaged.

... hmmn.. Lemme go and start washing the plates ...