Eclipse set to be 'best in years'
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Skywatchers eagerly awaiting Saturday's total lunar eclipse are hoping that the spectacle will be the "best in years".
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People gazing at the night sky from North and South America to Europe and western Africa will be able to see a total lunar eclipse - if the local weather cooperates.
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The annual Perseid meteor shower is expected to put on a great show this year, peaking in mid-August with a display of dozens of shooting stars each hour.
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InfoWorld - The Eclipse Foundation will debut technologies from 21 open-source projects simultaneously on Wednesday through its Europa release train.
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(InfoWorld) - The Eclipse Foundation, with an open source technology release on Monday, hopes to alleviate developers of clutter. Eclipse Mylar 1.0 is a task-focused user interface that reduces information overload and makes it easier to multitask, according to Eclipse. Mylar addresses a fundamental problem: that IDEs have made it easy to browse large systems with thousands or millions of lines of source code but they present too much data, said Mik Kersten, the project lead for Mylar. "They overload developers with so much information," Kersten said. "[Developers] can often spend more time looking for the information they need by browsing and searching than they actually spend programming," Kersten said. Accessible here, Mylar enables developers to focus on specific jobs at hand by bringing a task list view into the Eclipse IDE. Developers indicate which tasks they are working on and Mylar monitors all programming activities to create a task context featuring all information relevant to that task. Contexts can be shared with other developers. Mylarâs name was derived from the plastic film used to prevent blindness when viewing an eclipse. In the case of Eclipse's Mylar, "it prevents information blindness when staring at the Eclipse IDE," Kersten said. "This integrates across the entire Eclipse IDE," Kersten said. The task management facility is called a task-focused user interface. Also incorporated into Mylar is access to issue trackers such as Bugzilla. By integrating issue-tracking into the IDE, developers no longer have to toggle back and forth between browser and e-mail client to use an issue tracker. Developers also can work with Bugzilla reports offline and then reconnect afterward. Additionally, developers can be summoned to immediately work on a task that can show up in their task list. Mylar's context filtering and task management drew praises from analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk. Task-filtering is automated, as opposed to it being manually done before, he said. "When I've used Eclipse in the past, you can manually create a focus that filters out everything. But with Mylar, it can automatically create that focus for you, so it's less work on your part to create the focus," Cote said. "Because it's done programmatically, it can get a better sense of things that are related that you may not think of." But Mylar's freely available innovation could encroach on commercial products, Cote said. "I think this is the start of something that could do that, certainly," he said. "There's always encroachment with Eclipse," Cote said. Rational with its Jazz project offers technology similar to Mylar but on a much larger scale, Cote said, but Mylar could be expanded with capabilities now offered commercially. Mylar in its first version is developer-focused while other technologies in the space have capabilities such as application lifecycle management, Cote said. Mylar can be embedded into existing commercial products, Kersten said. It solves the problem of developers having to cope with multiple task managers that offer an inconsistent experience, he added. Third parties also can innovate on top of Mylar. Vendors including CollabNet and Borland are committed to using Mylar, he said.
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A look ahead at issues and events likely to make headlines in the year to come.
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InfoWorld - The Eclipse Foundation at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference in Cambridge, Mass., this week plans to tout the progress of open source projects focused on desktop application development, PHP (Hypertext Processor) and embedded Java.
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BALTIMORE - Astronomy buffs and amateur skywatchers turned out to watch a total lunar eclipse Wednesday night â-he last one Earth will get for nearly 2 1/2 years.
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InfoWorld - The Eclipse Foundation has established itself as a premier open source software tools project.
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Roy Ganor-Shwaartz (Team Leader at Zend for the PDT/Zend Studio for Eclipse projects) dropped us a line to let us know that he'll be speaking at this year's EclipseCon (2008).   It seems that PHP developers have attracted much attention from the Eclipse community. In the next EclipseCon conference I am going to make two sessions about PDT and its ecosystem.   His two talks are: Developing Rich Internet Application with Eclipse Tools (Wednesday) and Extending the PDT Project (Tuesday).    EclipseCon 2008 is happening March 17th through the 20th in Santa Clara, California and there's still time to get in on the Early Bird Discount for your registration (through Dec. 31st). Check out the conference schedule for a complete list of speakers.
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Hype hangover The Eclipse Foundation's plan to push ahead with a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) run-time framework later this year marks an interesting change of direction for the industry group.â¦
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WASHINGTON It&#39;s a global celestial event and scientists say the annual Geminid Meteor Shower is the best astronomy show of the year.
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Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) got the jump on the next generation of Java with an early release of its next Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE).
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With an eye toward both consumer and enterprise needs, Sun Microsystems is reworking the plug-in architecture of Java in an upcoming update to Java Platform Standard Edition (SE) 6, company officials said Wednesday evening.Overall, Sun officials at a briefing in San Francisco stressed the company's new emphasis on not just the enterprise space but consumer systems as well, with the company extending Java and rich experiences to various devices.With the plug-in platform, a ground-up rewrite is under way, said Ken Russell, from the Java SE deployment team. "This will change how your poker game in [a] Web browser is run as well as your corporate app," Russell said.The new architecture is planned for inclusion in the upcoming beta of what is now being referred to as Java SE 6 Update N, due in December."Really, the defining feature of it is that it runs the applets in a separate process than the Web browser," Russell said.Features of the plug-in plan include improved scripting support and reliability. More powerful applications can be supported than in the past. Users will be able to tune an applet to run in a particular version of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE); this will enable developers to target one JRE without having to change the behavior of any other applet. Testing also will be simplified.In addition, better backing will be offered for Windows Vista, including capabilities for signed applets. Support will be offered for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 browsers as well as for Firefox 3 alpha builds and the Firefox 2 browser. Platforms capable of running the plug-in include Solaris, Windows and Linux.Current plans call for the plug-in technology to be turned on via a switch in the Java control panel.Sun also delved into other features planned for Java SE 6 Update N."Update N is about fixing the consumer experience," with a more solid browser plug-in experience and a better installation experience, said Chet Haase, Java SE client architect. Sun also wants to better enable Java for rich Internet applications.A faster startup for Java is also planned. This is important in the Web ad and lightweight game space, Haase said. Also planned is inclusion of technology from a project called Quickstarter, which preloads disk cache to bolster performance of lightweight applications. Faster graphics is planned as well, as is Nimbus, which provides a new look and feel for Java Swing client systems.Haase also noted Sun's plan for the Java Kernel, which enables downloading just the parts of Java that are needed to run an application. While that application is running, the rest of the platform is downloaded.James Gosling, chief technology officer for the Sun client software group, reviewed plans for JavaFX, which is Sun's platform for building rich, consistent user experiences for a wide variety of devices and systems."JavaFX really is a marketing term that is sort of an umbrella for a set of activities," Gosling said. The platform covers consumer-facing technologies and features a services layer based on Java and a database, a presentation layer with HTTPD, and an edge device component, covering desktops to phones to TVs."This edge part of the universe -- this is what JavaFX is all about," said Gosling.Featured in JavaFX is JavaFX Mobile, which is a software stack for mobile phones; Java SE 6 Update N, also known as the consumer JRE; the JavaFX Script scripting language, and JavaFX designer and developer tools."[JavaFX Script is] a scripting language sort of in the sense of PHP [Hypertext Preprocessor] and Python and all the rest of them. But while those are focused at generating HTML from the presentation layer outward, JavaFX Script is really all about rich user interactions," Gosling said.
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By J. Hope Babowice  You wanted to know  Courtland Kusmierz of Gurnee wanted to know:  When is there going to be an eclipse?  If you have a question you'd like Kids Ink to answer, write Kids Ink, care of the Daily Herald, 1795 N.
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LONDON - The first total lunar eclipse in three years will give nearly every continent at least a partial view when the moon turns a shade of crimson as light reaching it from the sun is blotted out by the Earth.
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The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a new blog post from Yossi Leon about the upcoming release of the Zend Studio for Eclipse:   Zend Studio for Eclipse is just around the corner. Very soon we are planning to release the product after few beta cycles were we got thousands of feedbacks.   They've added their "new level of features" that they hope will make ZSfE one of the better development experiences out there - refactoring tools, code generation to make some of the basics and PHPUnit testing to make it simpler to debug your applications.   You can find out more about the software and its current release over on its page on the Zend website.