| Genuitec Keeps Pulse on Eclipse Plug-Ins | | Print | |
| Wednesday, 19 December 2007 | |
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Keeping software updated, long a headache for LAN admins, has proven a matter of guesswork for multivendor open source frameworks like Eclipse. That’s because, unlike platforms offered by individual vendors like Microsoft or Red Hat, or enterprise apps from players like SAP, Oracle, or Salesforce, there’s no single vendor responsible for keeping customer installs updated. Genuitec, whose flagship product is the MyEclipse IDE, has unveiled what is essentially a babysitting service to keep the plug-ins of your Eclipse IDE up to date.
In essence, Genuitec will keep tabs on the most popular Eclipse plug-ins, meaning it will check most of what you’ve installed outside of some of the newer or more obscure third-party plug-ins. Designed for the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), you download a 2-Mbyte file that acts like the agents from commonplace in commercial software packages that check the currency of the version and patches after each boot up. It’s an attempt to fill a gap in the Eclipse world, where unlike the commercial software environment, no single vendor exists to keep versions in sync. Given the diversity of the Eclipse framework, which now spans form design through run time, there’s bound to be diversity in the mix of plug-ins that are installed. Consequently, Pulse was not designed to be a one-size-fits-all solution; if you decide to formally register, Pulse can take a profile of your Eclipse installation and therefore tailor downloads for the plug-ins you currently have. With the company’s main business being Eclipse tooling, the Eclipse framework was the obvious first target for Pulse. The service is offered for free to Eclipse users. Obviously the company intends to make a real business out of this. The business plans include charging vendors for managing their update streams and expanding to other software development platforms. Towards that end, Genuitec has just announced support for Google’s Android mobile platform and Adobe’s classic ColdFusion tooling.             |
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