On Ruby: Blogging Contest: February Challenge

On Ruby: Blogging Contest: February Challenge

How Ruby has blown my mind

Eclipse Mylar Introduces Major New Innovation for Developer Productivity

Eclipse Mylar Introduces Major New Innovation for Developer Productivity

"New Task-Focused UI Filters Eclipse IDE Views to Show Only Elements Relevant to a Specific Task". Sounds good ...

- Vasudev Ram

Open source is getting more "mainstream" as people realize its economic benefits

Open source is getting more "mainstream" as software product companies - not just
the general software user - realize its economic benefits. A few examples:

There are many commercial products and plugins based on Eclipse, the leading open source development platform/IDE for Java. See Eclipse Plugin Central for some of them.

Borland, another leading software development tools company, is basing the latest release of its flagship JBuilder product, on Eclipse. (The development tools are now actually from CodeGear - a Borland subsidiary to which Borland spun of its development tools unit, including JBuilder, C++ Builder and Delphi.)

The new Eclipse-based JBuilder 2007.

Actuate, a reporting tools company, has also based its latest product Actuate BIRT on BIRT from the Eclipse Foundation.

Another interesting article about Eclipse:

Eclipse's future appears to be sunny

Excerpts:

"“There's great corporate support there and it was a great base product,” Goodall said.
"

"In an average month, the Ottawa-based Eclipse Foundation gets about half a million requests to download the base Eclipse software development kit, according to Ian Skerrett, the foundation's director of marketing. "

"So why did IBM open-source Eclipse? Thomson said it was a way to maximize adoption and create the best product. The idea was that “the real value of integration would come from the customer,” he said."

"Goodall said there was a strong economic argument too. “There's no margin in
integrated development environments, and no money in integrated development environments,” he said. Companies like IBM make their money on their database management systems, application servers and so forth, but they need IDEs to offer their customers a complete set of tools. So, said Goodall, “if there's no margin in the product, it's about controlling cost of development.” Open-sourcing Eclipse allowed IBM to do that and benefit from the input of other developers. The Eclipse consortium that IBM set up shortly after open-sourcing the code included Borland, Merant (since acquired by Serena Software), Ottawa-based QNX Software Systems, Rational Software (since taken over by IBM), Red Hat Software, SUSE (now part of Novell Inc.) and TogetherSoft (since acquired by Borland). Today, the Eclipse Foundation has 152 members.
"

"Though he foresees some people will disagree, Goodall said Eclipse is not the leading innovator in the IDE market. He gives that distinction to Microsoft's Visual Studio, but he said Eclipse is doing well as a fast follower. “They're about six months behind where Visual Studio is,” he said, “but that's OK - they're always within spitting distance.”
"

- Vasudev Ram

You ARE a marketer. Deal with it.

Lovely post by Kathy Sierra. I really liked and agree with it ...

The post: You ARE a marketer. Deal with it.

Kathy was at Sun, is founder of JavaRanch, the world's largest online Java community, and one of the people responsible for starting the innovative and wicked cool Head Start series of books from O'Reilly.

The post ends thusly:

"Remember -- when people are passionate about something, and in a state of flow--and you have contributed to that by helping users/members learn and grow and kick ass--these are some of the happiest moments in their lives. Trying to promote more of that is something we should feel wonderful about, not guilty"

Wow ...

- Vasudev Ram

Undergraduate VP of multinational company; TopCoder programming competitions site

Undergraduate VP of multinational company

Wu Yingying, 21, a psychology major, is now the Asia operations vice president with Connecticut-based TopCoder in Oct. 2006.

Some reports on the net cast doubts on the veracity of the claims made about her, such as the fact that she has over 100 inventions. Don't know for sure what's correct ...

--

TopCoder programming competitions site

TopCoder conducts programming competitions that have cash rewards. A very good site, I heard somewhere that it is developed in Java and considered one of the best designed and developed sites in Java. The competitions are in Java/J2EE and .NET. Prize amounts are reasonable to good.

- Vasudev Ram

Python module for Sybase

Sybase module 0.38pre1 released.

Sébastien Sablé has released a Python module for Sybase.

Excerpt:

"The Sybase module provides a Python interface to the Sybase relational
database system. It supports all of the Python Database API, version
2.0 with extensions."

Sounds good. This means we can write Python programs that work with Sybase databases.

- Vasudev Ram

Borland Spins Off Its Tools Unit

Borland is separating its developer tools division into the CodeGear brand.

Borland Spins Off Its Tools Unit

- Vasudev Ram