Unified Development Environment with Eclipse IDE

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Suchin Rengan's Blog | August 23, 2005   6:58 AM | Comments (0)

There are many reasons for Eclipse’s dominance and one major factor has been its Plug-ins technology. The Eclipse Plug-ins technology enables one to extend the Eclipse SDE (Standard Development Environment) and create tools or features to be accessed within Eclipse environment thereby avoiding one to leave an environment that a developer is working on. Software product vendors have leveraged the Eclipse Plug-ins runtime architecture to provide an interface to interact with their product run-time components. The plug-in technology provides a great framework to develop and deploy plug-ins.

In my next article, I will introduce Eclipse Plug-ins architecture and Eclipse SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) used to develop GUI components required to interact with the plug-in run-time components. Also, I will discuss how to deploy and configure a plug-in. I am also planning on writing a separate article on how to develop an Eclipse plug-in.

For now, I will point to you the various Eclipse related projects underway at Eclipse Organization, BEA, dev2dev CodeShare and elsewhere that enables a developer to create a unified development experience on Eclipse IDE.

Eclipse Web Tools Platform project: This project, popularly known as Eclipse WTP, is hosted by Eclipse organization and focuses on providing framework for developing J2EE web applications. The Eclipse WTP will provide support for source editors for various types of J2EE components and Web services.

This project is particularly interesting for developers developing generic J2EE web applications and using various J2EE containers to deploy and execute. Some of the highlights of this project are J2EE container agnostic, reference framework for developing J2EE web applications, deploy and test on multiple J2EE platforms.

For more information, please visit http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/

Workshop 9.0: This project by BEA is an IDE release for developing portal and integration applications on WebLogic platform. The next version of Workshop will be Eclipse based. This product is slated for release along with the WebLogic 9.0 platform.

This project is interesting for developers developing WebLogic Portal and Integration applications on WebLogic platform.

Eclipse Pollinate: This project, hosted by Eclipse organization aims to build an Eclipse-based IDE and toolset on top of Apache Beehive application framework. Apache Beehive framework provides run-time framework for components such as NetUI page flows, Controls and Web Services.

This project is particularly interesting for developers developing J2EE applications on platforms that support Apache Beehive components.

For more information on Apache Beehive, please visit http://beehive.apache.org/

For more information on Eclipse Pollinate project, please visit http://www.eclipse.org/pollinate/

Eclipse CodeShare project: This project, hosted on dev2dev CodeShare intends to create Eclipse based administering and monitoring tools for BEA platform. I will be creating a separate article on why this is important and also provide the direction and roadmap for this project. I am a co-lead for this project along with Jeremy Whitlock, whose Weblogic-Plugin is the most popular CodeShare project under dev2dev.

For more information on this project, please visit https://eclipse.projects.dev2dev.bea.com/

Other Eclipse Plug-ins resources: There are many more resources for developers for Eclipse plug-ins. Some popular ones are:

http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/
http://www.myeclipseide.com/index.php

And of course, developers can still utilize the base Eclipse Java project to develop Java applications.

So given all these Eclipse based projects, developers can customize their development environment by utilizing plug-ins of their interest to create a unified development environment.

I would love to hear from you, if there are gaps and certain interesting plug-ins that you might feel useful to create a unified development environment on WebLogic platform.

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