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World Wide Web

2007 – a recapitulation

Warning: Some bit of self praise ahead.

Nearing the end of yet another successful year. The year 2007 has been one of the ‘longest’ year in my life. With milestones achieved and several noteworthy events in both my personal and professional life, I should say, this perhaps could not be better!

Here are some important milestones/events in the last year (in no particular order):

  • Learnt car driving and also got my 4 wheeler license. This was pending for a very long time.
  • Part of the organization committee of the Web 2.0 conference organized by CSI Bangalore. I also delivered a talk on Enterprise application of Web 2.0 here.
  • Attended swimming classes, another thing that had been pending since a long time.
  • Tried my hand at cooking (could have done better).
  • Got myself an iPod Nano.
  • Delivered several talks and conducted hands-on workshop in colleges mostly on Eclipse.
  • A few solo bike rides including the ring-road trip (This got more traction than I had expected with casual readers noting this more than my other entries!).
  • Went to a few places and clicked a lot of photos.
  • Guided a successful intern project.
  • Eclifox release in alphaWorks.
  • A few awards, papers and recognitions.
  • Several other professional achievements – which unfortunately I cannot mention here.
  • Last but not the least: experimented with my hair style and got a whole bunch of comments from family and friends!
Categories
World Wide Web

Eclifox – the publicity

Wow! Never imagined this would happen so soon.

Oct 16th:
Eclifox is currently in the front-page of ZDNet Japan.

The number of Google results for ‘eclifox’ is 12,200. Before Eclifox was released it was around 10.

There have been some good reviews and a lot of references to Eclifox in general.

Thanks to all those who have shown interest.

Oct 17th:
1:00 pm IST – 50,800
6:10 pm IST – 223,000

Oct 19th:
Eclifox in the Java Posse podcast.

Nov 28th:
Now that it is out of most feeds, the number of results is hovering around 700.

Categories
World Wide Web

Eclifox – bringing Eclipse to the browser

We finally made it! Eclifox is now an Alphaworks technology.

So what is Eclifox?
In order to understand what Eclifox is, look at the screenshot below:


What do you see?

If you think that this is the screenshot of the Eclipse IDE, you are only partially right. Look again. It is Eclipse running in the Firefox browser!

Here is a flash demo of Eclifox. (Run it in full-screen). The demo shows the usage of Python and Ruby plugins from Eclifox.

A bit of history:
About a year and a half back I came up with a thought. How would it be if we were able to provide web based access to Eclipse functionality? Initially it was not clear how we could achieve this, but the idea seemed promising. So we thought we would give it a try by giving this of to a bunch of interns.

In came a group of 6 students who not only had the passion to complete this, but also the zeal to learn the technology required to make it work.

Hats off to the following interns who made it a reality:

  • Adarsh Ramamurthy
  • Karthik Ananth
  • Mohd Amjed Chand
  • Prasanna V. Pandit
  • Srirang G. Doddihal
  • Vikas Patil

The above interns from SJCE put their heart and soul to this effort and developed the whole thing in less than 4 months time. Personally, I enjoyed the 6 months time I spent on guiding these students. We have a stunned a lot of people within IBM with this idea. No one expected an internship project to get so much praise (or even criticism!).

Thanks to Kiran who provided guidance throughout the course of this project. Also for spending umpteen hours in getting this on alphaWorks! Also thanks to several people who provided the support when it was required.

And now about the technologies used:
The basic idea is to include a plug-in in Eclipse that helps us interact with Eclipse to fetch UI definitions and also to simulate events on Eclipse. The technologies used are primarily Javascript (with XMLHttp) on the client side and Jetty as the server embedded in Eclipse. For more information read the alphaWorks page.

So try it out and let us know what you feel!