Difference between revisions of "Eclipse Stories"

Latest revision as of 11:02, 10 September 2010

Lots of people are doing incredible things with Eclipse. People are building amazing applications that embedded Eclipse technology. Companies have standardized on Eclipse as their development tools platform. As with any open source community, sharing information is critical to keeping a community healthy and strong. Sharing how you use Eclipse will help other people realize the full potential of Eclipse technology.

We want you to share your Eclipse story with the community. On this wiki page, we are encourage individuals and companies to tell the community how they use Eclipse. Tell us what type of applications you build, what Eclipse technology you use and what you like about Eclipse. You can tell us your personal story or tell us what your company is doing. Just tell us your story.

Stories

Title: Protein Analysis with Eclipse RCP

Name: Cell Biosciences

Cell Biosciences is a company that provides instruments and software to analyze the proteins in the human body. Their systems help life science researchers in research institutions and pharmaceutical/biotechnology companies.

Cell Biosciences uses Eclipse RCP to create desktop applications to analyze the data sent from their imaging machines. The RCP based application use allows researchers to setup, run and analyze data experiments. The applications feature graphs, images and tables of data that can be sliced in different ways.

In addition to RCP, Cell Biosciences uses Eclipse as their development tool platform. Their systems include Java, Python, Javascript and C/C++ code. To support their development needs they use PyDev, Subclipse, Egit, JUnit, SWT Bot, TPTP Test and Performance, WTP WSDL editing and Aptana for Javascript.

More details at http://wiki.eclipse.org/images/9/93/CellbioEclipseDay.pdf

Title: Alone in the vi-lderness

Name: Nortel (Ottawa)

Story: I was introduced to Eclipse while working in Java for a network management group. Very smart architect/designer made great use of a number of open source tools to create a complex network management tool that cost the company practically nothing to distribute. I went back to a team doing on-switch development in C and stepped back 20 years where the main tools were vi and grep. Used very efficiently mind you. A smart bunch. I wanted more, downloaded CDT and eclipse 3.5. Only problem was it appears I was the only person in the entire division of the company using Eclipse/CDT. Still don't kno why.

Title: User-friendly BPMN Tool Suite based on Eclipse RCP

Name: BonitaSoft

BonitaSoft is a software company providing an intuitive and powerful Open Source Business Process Management Solution called Bonita Open Solution (BOS). This BPM suite includes Bonita Studio, an RCP application, Bonita Execution Engine, a powerful and scalable BPM engine, and Bonita User Experience, an email like end-user interface.

With BOS Studio users can model their business processes with BPMN notation and generate a fully operational Web application to automate those processes (i.e. supply chain, expenses management, new hire, employee questionnaire etc.).

BOS Studio mainly consists of two highly customized GMF editors, but also uses BIRT, Jetty, Groovy, JDT and DataTools to provide powerful and easy to use features. The development of Bonita Studio has started a bit more than a year ago, and since then the BonitaSoft R&D team has been able to experiment the Eclipse ecosystem to achieve the functional richness offered by Bonita Studio.

It allowed us to release the first version of our software it in a very short time, leveraging the IDE, the framework and also the Community.

To be more precise, we use JDT, PDE and Subversive to develop the product. We also integrate the PDE build in Hudson. The build contains code generation of EMF and GMF models. There are also automated tests using JUnit, SWTBot and SWTBot4GEF. We use some other tools to ensure assess the quality of the development: MAT to check memory consumption, Sleak to monitor graphical resource management, TPTP to improve performance, Cobertura for code coverage and Findbugs for code quality.

We’ve tried so far to follow Eclipse release train as fast as we can. The current BOS Studio version is based on version 3.5.1; we moved to version 3.6.0 to develop the forthcoming release of Bonita Open Solution and blogged about this experience. We are extensively using the responsive Eclipse Community:

• The community helps us to solve our issues on forum or on the bugtracker.
• We are also paying great attention to PlanetEclipse RSS flux, where there is a bunch of very useful information.
• Two of us went to EclipseCon to meet with other Eclipse users and share experience.

The Community is one of the keys for productivity, and we are very thankful for the contribution it provides. For that reason, we try to give back to the community, and we are proud of getting involved in the following ways:

• participating in forums,
• raising bugs,
• proposing patches,
• publishing blog posts which are relayed on PlanetEclipse,
• proposing talks for EclipseCon and ESE (and giving one at EclipseCon 2010).

Title: Keeping Track of the Zombie Apocalypse with Eclipse STEM

Name: Tero Parviainen

I recently participated in a programming contest, in which the goal was to come up with a web-based application over a single weekend (48 hours). I had been reading a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, and especially some great books involving zombies, and came up with an idea: Wouldn't it be cool to visualize the spread of a global zombie outbreak over time and see which parts of the world would be worst off, and which parts would be safe?

After some research, I came across the Eclipse Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler, which turned out to be exactly what I needed to come up with the data for the visualization. I had zero previous experience of epidemiology, but was able to quickly pick up some rudimentary knowledge from the STEM documentation and Wikipedia. The Eclipse IDE has been my tool of choice for Java development for several years, so the user interface and some of the concepts of stem clicked with me right away.

After some experimentation, I was able to come up with a convincing model for the outbreak, and the result is zombiepandemictracker.com. The STEM project is on Github, and for the application itself, both the source code of the original competition entry, and of the new version currently running the site are available.

The experiment was a lot of fun, and I was really happy to see a project such as STEM available as open source. In the process I also got in touch with the STEM team about possible future developments in bringing the capabilities of STEM to the web. I'm looking forward to working on the project and exploring the possibilities in this space.