Dev Plans Emerge At EclipseCon, Mix06

The Eclipse Foundation spotlighted new members and initiatives at its EclipseCon gathering last week in Santa Clara, Calif., including a fledgling PHP IDE project that will expand the open-source Eclipse development platform beyond the Java support for which it is best known.

Meanwhile, Microsoft upstaged itself at its Mix06 show in Las Vegas by announcing a delay in the Vista operating system to which many of its new advances are linked.

Eclipse now counts 130 members among its ranks and supports 61 projects. Developers are barreling toward a June launch of Callisto, an initiative coordinating the simultaneous release of 10 major Eclipse projects, including a C/C++ IDE and a graphical modeling framework.

Microsoft’s Mix06 releases included a Go-Live license for Atlas, allowing developers to put projects into production using preview versions of Microsoft’s framework for building AJAX-like functionality in Web applications.

“Now we can start slipping Atlas into all of our projects,” said Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo Software, a pure-Microsoft development shop in Point Richmond, Calif. “I don’t know if that’s going to save money or reduce the cost of development, but we’ll have a better user experience.”

The Windows Presentation Foundation graphical subsystem at Vista’s core was a show focus, with partners lining up to demo applications built atop the software. WPF is Windows-only, but Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., offered up details on WPF/E, a framework for porting some of WPF’s multimedia features to other platforms. However, some developers said their enthusiasm dimmed when they heard about WPF/E’s time line—Version 1 isn’t due out until 2007, with device support slated for the second half of the year.

“Without a greatly enhanced feature set, it’s tough to make the case for it,” said Pete Brown, a lead systems architect for Reston, Va.-based Microsoft Gold partner Applied Information Sciences.