In the wee hours of August 1, the moon and the sun will pass each other for a breathtaking full solar eclipse, but U.S. residents won't be able to catch a glimpse of the phenomenon because of their location on the planet.
San Francisco's Exploratorium science museum is broadcasting the eclipse to the masses, however, combining science and technology by streaming the eclipse on virtual world Second Life.
In the real world, a team from the Exploratorium science museum will be traveling to the Xinjiang Province in Northwestern China, close to the Mongolian border, to stream a Webcast of the eclipse. The museum is staying open all night to bring the Webcast to museum visitors, as well as its online viewers and members of Second Life.
Second Life avatars view the 2006 full solar eclipse in the virtual world.
(Credit: Exploratorium)Total solar eclipses happen usually only every 18 months or so, and the team must travel to China because the full eclipse is only visible on a narrow slice on the surface of Earth.
Second Life users can view the 45-minute Webcast, starting at 3:30 a.m. PDT August 1, on the virtual world's so-called Exploratorium Island. Avatars can also gather at the Pi Day Theater at the Sploland Sim, at the Science School Sim, and at the Spindrift Sim. The eclipse will be accompanied by video and commentary of Exploratorium and NASA scientists.
Starting July 1, Second Life members and their real-life makers can use Exploratorium Island to learn about solar eclipses, Chinese culture, and solar science.
The Exploratorium has previously paired with Second Life and NASA to deliver space news. In 2006, for instance, the team traveled to Turkey to broadcast the solar eclipse, and NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander team has created an avatar for the exploring robot in the virtual world.
Non-Second Life users can view the Webcast on the Exploratorium Web site, and the CNET News.com multimedia team will provide coverage of the event after viewing the live video in the Exploratorium.
Microsoft will begin collaborating with the Eclipse Foundation to improve native Windows application development on Java.
Sam Ramji
(Credit: Microsoft)Sam Ramji, the director of Microsoft's open-source software lab, announced at the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Wednesday that the lab will work with Eclipse .
The goal of the joint work, which will include contributions from Microsoft engineers, is to make it easier to use Java to write applications that take full advantage of the look and feel of Windows Vista. Ramji wrote about the planned collaboration on Microsoft's Port25 blog.
"Among a range of other opportunities (which we're still working on), we discovered that Steve Northover (the SWT team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We're committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers," he wrote.
The move builds on several initiatives coming from Microsoft's open-source software labs to ensure that open-source products work well on Windows and other Microsoft products.
The interoperability work from the open-source lab continues to rise in prominence at Microsoft. Last month, the company's top executives rolled out a number of interoperability initiatives only a few days before international delegates considered a vote to standardize Microsoft's Open XML document format.
Eclipse, which has become the most popular development environment for Java, is the biggest competitor that Microsoft faces to its Visual Studio developer tool line. With the exception of Sun Microsystems, most other large software companies have committed to using Eclipse in some way.
"It just makes sense to enable Java on Windows. We started a collaborative effort with JBoss two years ago that continues to this day. At the end of the day, it's all about the developer," Ramji said.
The Eclipse Foundation on Monday announced the creation of a project called Equinox, a significant expansion for the open-source group beyond development tools and into runtime software.
The project will focus on making tools for deploying applications once they are completed. For example, the software would allow an IT professional to install only portions of a Java application as needed, rather than all of the code, to save on server resources.
The Equinox runtime software will be an implementation of a standard, called OSGi, formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative.
The technology gives software companies a standardized way to break applications down into smaller components that can work together once an application is deployed, according to the OSGi Alliance.
The Equinox project has the backing of a number of existing Eclipse projects which already deal with platforms for deploying applications, including the Eclipse Communications Framework and Rich Ajax Platform.
The software will be suitable for deploying applications across different operating systems and hardware, including servers and mobile, according to Eclipse.
The move is a significant departure for Eclipse, which is best known as a popular open-source integrated development environment (IDE) for designing and writing programs, particularly for Java.
Tony Baer of Eclipse said that OSGi and Equinox could make traditionally monolithic middleware more flexible and easier to work with.
"With Equinox planting Eclipse's feet into run time, the potential of OSGi could become pretty huge," he said in a blog posting. "Taken literally, it could provide a new model for application integration, or in the words of RedMonk's James Governor, a 'stackless stack.' Governor provides a detailed listing of early offerings that are supporting the OSGi model of dynamic composition of applications.
"If you take the idea of stackless stacks to its logical conclusion, that means the end of monolithic middleware stacks as we know them."
BEA Systems rolled out a slew of announcements Wednesday and, no, none of them had to do with Oracle's efforts to acquire the company, or BEA's largest shareholder Carl Icahn raising a stink about its lackluster share price.
Rather, the company unveiled its BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Security 3.0, its new WebLogic Event Server tools to support Eclipse's open-source environment, and announced its BEA Guardian will be offered free of charge.
BEA's AquaLogic Enterprise Security 3.0 is designed to dish up new security service modules to aid customers' ability to secure application integrations, business processes, a range of application environments and corporate data stored in relational databases. BEA plans to make the 3.0 version generally available on Friday.
The middleware vendor also rolled out its Eclipse-based tooling support for BEA WebLogic Event Server users. The tools aim to enable Eclipse developers to quickly code, test, and deploy service-oriented architecture services and applications geared toward processing numerous data streams, using rules to detect patterns and characteristics in the data.
BEA is not only offering up its BEA Guardian for free, but also will do likewise when its BEA Guardian 1.1 version makes its debut in the spring. BEA Guardian is designed to scan application servers and remove potential incompatibilities before they occur. In the next version, 1.1, BEA will also bundle the software in with its upcoming WebLogic Server releases.
The Eclipse Foundation on Tuesday released Eclipse PHP Development Tools 1.0, software that it hopes will open Eclipse up to the millions of PHP Web developers.
Eclipse has become a widely used integrated development environment for Java programmers. But scripting, or dynamic, languages like PHP have become increasingly popular, particularly for the front-end development. Now people trained in Eclipse can write PHP applications and get access to about 1,400 plug-ins.
But Zend has chosen to participate in the project and will build commercial tools on top of the Eclipse PHP Development Tools software. It plans to introduce the commercial tools in the first quarter of next year.
Why? It's better to disrupt your own business than have someone else do it to, he says. The tools project also makes PHP--already used by 4.5 million people--potentially more appealing to programmers looking for a better tool or already familiar with Eclipse. About 50 percent of PHP developers already use Java, he said.
The Eclipse tools, combined with the Zend Platform, which acts much like an application server, Zend and other vendors are making PHP more corporate-friendly, de Visser said.
"We look at (Microsoft's) .Net as a good example. We're very comfortable mimicking (that) and knowing that companies want an alternative because they don't want to buy the whole Microsoft stack."
(Credit:
Mozilla)
Most open-source projects would be ecstatic for even a fraction of the kind of growth that Mozilla is reporting for Firefox. Consider this: 25 million downloads in the first 99 days; 100 million downloads in the first year; and 400 million in the first three years.
As Glyn Moody points out, the importance here is not in the sheer volume, but rather in the increasing volume. Firefox to date has doubled every year. Every single year.
So, what should Mozilla do with this?
... Read more
(Credit:
Eclipse Foundation)
As I told Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, my understanding of Eclipse is several years old. I called him today to get an update on Eclipse, and learn what all the fuss is about.
As it turns out, quite a bit.
Eclipse may be the most important open-source "project" that people outside the industry, and even some within it, have never heard of. Here's why.
... Read moreGlyn Moody has an excellent article in Redmond Magazine on open source and interoperability. As it turns out, sometimes it takes Microsoft to notify the open-source community that for all the great things we've done, we sometimes fall short. One area that open source had traditionally failed in was in stitching together an end-to-end solution, as Nick McGrath (a friend and a wonderful person) suggests:
Of all the accusations Microsoft has leveled over the years against open source, perhaps the least contentious is that it lacks the tight integration offered by Microsoft's own products. As Nick McGrath, director of platform strategy for Microsoft in the United Kingdom, puts it: "One of the problems I've seen with open-source software is it doesn't take on board some of the issues that customers have around interoperability and integration. Open-source projects tend to offer a very specific point solution."
This statement has become less true over time, though it's still the case that there is no one open-source vendor providing seamless interoperability between disparate pieces of enterprise software (in the way that Oracle and Microsoft do or attempt to do). My bet is on Red Hat to become that company over time, but in the meantime, we're not there yet.
... Read more- prev
- 1
- next
