By Jonathan Crow

Continuing coverage of EclipseCon 2008. From the funny to the serious. I walked into the exhibit hall, quickly sidestepping the Oracle contingent (nothing against them, you can just find a wealth of information about them anywhere anytime) operating the front lines of the hall, and found myself at the MyEclipse booth. After that I hit Collabnet and Crystal Reports (now called “Business Objects, an SAP Company”). Hopefully I can get to more later.

MyEclipse

These guys bill themselves as the complete solution that gives you more bang for your buck in developing your Open Source based projects. They have a comprehensive Java EE / J2EE IDE for the Eclipse platform, and bring a high number of plug-ins to the table so that your environment can be pre-configured. The guy I was talking to said that for beginning developers it could save hundreds of hours. While more advanced coders may not see quite the benefit there are still tools they will find useful. From what he said, they have millions of downloads and are doing quite well in ramping that user adoption. They offer a great channel for companies like Spring.

Collabnet

Collabnet creates products for collaborating on development projects across diverse locations. Coming from my past life in collaborating on documents, I found it interesting that collaboration is collaboration is collaboration. Developers working on code have the same needs as marketing people collaborating on documents. We both don’t want to have to leave our environment in order to use seperate collaboration tools, we need to easily and intuitively see how the project has evolved, and who has been doing the evolving (pointing fingers is a fun game to play;).

Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports has been around for quite some time, I remember seeing them in the late ’90s and know they were around before that. They have some new Business Intelligence tools and with the merger with SAP they are poised to be integrated in some interesting projects. In some ways Crystal Reports hasn’t changed - they still have great tools to hook into just about any database on the back end that you could name. On the front end however, they have highly developed the output of the reports they produce, adopting an almost Apple like look and feel. They have another product called Elcelsior, which the guy I was talking to billed as the Executive Management version (in other words pretty pretty shiny shiny, but not as strong on the back end). It looks like they have an impressive array of products that coupled together could solve some sticky problems for people trying to understand how to improve their business.

Stay tuned for more from EclipseCon 2008.

March 18th, 2008