New Tools at EclipseCon Reach for Clouds -- Visual Studio Magazine

New Tools at EclipseCon Reach for Clouds

By John K. Waters
03/30/2009

Numerous software suppliers last week took the wraps off new Eclipse-based tools, and a few were brought to cloud-based services.

At the annual EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Amazon Web Services announced an Eclipse plug-in for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) pay-as-you-go, cloud-based infrastructure services.

The new AWS Toolkit for Eclipse is designed to make it easier for developers to develop, deploy and debug Java apps that use AWS. The AWS platform includes Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a Web service that provides rentable/scalable compute capacity in the cloud, and Simple Storage Service (S3) Internet-based storage service.

Peter Vosshall, vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon, said in a presentation that the toolkit's initial release is aimed at developers using EC2. Based on the WTP, the toolkit is being released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Salesforce.com also announced a new version of its Eclipse-based Force.com IDE. Force.com is designed to provide developers with a build-and-test environment for cloud computing apps that run on the Force.com platform. Among other features, this release includes a new version of the Apex language code editor that provides code-completion suggestions as they are typed for user-defined classes, system classes and schema objects. There's also enhanced metadata support that adds Force.com sites, customer portals and partner portals to Force.com IDE projects.

Actuate Corp. launched its new BIRT Global Partner Connection at this year's conference. BIRT (which stands for "Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools") is an Eclipse project originated by Actuate. The Partner Connection program was developed to build a network of collaborating companies with BIRT expertise and skills on top of an existing developer community (Eclipse).

Also at EclipseCon, Oracle released its Enterprise Pack for Eclipse Release 11g, a free add-on to its Fusion Middleware offering. Targeted at Java and database developers, the new release adds object relational mapping (ORM), support for Spring and Web services interfaces for developers targeting Oracle back-end systems. The Eclipse plug-ins will let developers build Java Standard Edition (SE), Enterprise Edition (EE), Spring, ORM and Web services-based apps for Oracle databases and WebLogic application servers, Oracle said.

About the Author

John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at [email protected].

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