Genuitec, which has been known for its Eclipse development tools, is continuing to evolve its months-old Pulse offering, which is designed to bring order to managing your Eclipse desktop. The new version contains features that are of use to an audience which Genuitec initially underestimated: ISVs.

Pulse was designed to provide a way to keep your Eclipse plug-in versions current and sync’ed with one another. Registered users can have Pulse manage their profile, which maps the mix of plug-ins that they use, and the version interdependencies between them. It is redolent of the software “images” maintained by desktop software management tools form the likes of Altiris or LANDesk, except that in this case, you’re dealing with plug-ins, or software components, that are far more granular (and in many cases more interdependent) than conventional desktop software packages.

It was intended to fill a vacuum for a development platform built on best of breed, represented by many vendors, but controlled by no one. When Genuitec initially unleashed Pulse last fall, they thought that the primary use case would be developers trying to keep their Eclipse desktops up to date. But they also uncovered latent demand from Eclipse solution providers who wanted ways for delivering to market their unique plug-in bundles.

Consequently, Pulse 2.1 lets you share your Eclipse profile with other users, a feature that is useful to development teams that need to be sync’ed, and to solution providers who want to keep their installed bases in sync. It also provides a way for you to hot deploy your Eclipse “image” onto a remote machine, on demand.

Genuitec has also added some enhancements to the “Blue” version of its MyEclipse IDE. To recap, Blue is aimed at former IBM WebSphere Application Developer (WSAD) developers, who do not want to follow IBM’s migration path to Rational Application Developer. The new version of Blue adds project migration tools, so you can automate the moving of entire Java EE projects and related documentation to MyEclipse. Additionally, the new version adds support of the capability to maintain multiple profiles of the same WebSphere/MyEclipse project for cases where different deployments must be treated differently.

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