Monthly Archives: June 2011

Eclipse 3.7 is available for download!

Posted on by
Reply

There is a lot of great stuff in Eclipse 3.7.

Key New Features for Java Developers

  • EGit 1.0 release provides first-class support for Java developers using Git for source code management
  • WindowBuilder, a world-class Eclipse-based GUI builder, is now available as an Eclipse open source project
  • Automated functional GUI testing for Java and HTML applications is included via Jubula
  • m2eclipse brings tight integration with Maven and the Eclipse workspace, enabling developers to work with Maven projects directly from Eclipse
  • Mylyn 3.6 supports Hudson build monitoring directly from the Eclipse workspace
  • Eclipse Marketplace Client now supports drag and drop installation of Eclipse-based solutions directly into Eclipse making it significantly easier to install new solutions.

Window Builder for Eclipse – for SWT, RCP and SWING UI's

Posted on by
2

With the announcement of Eclipse 3.7 you can see it now includes the Window Builder that Google contributed to the foundation. I wrote about this back in December if 2010 and now it is officially in the 3.7 release. This is an excellent tool and even more amazing is that less than six months later it is officially supported in Eclipse. Great job Eclipse!

SWT and SWING for that matter have always been a hard thing for new people to handle. With the builder you can visually lay out your user interface and see how the code is generated. I think tools like this are a must have for developers. Maybe we will see an uptake in SWT adoption now for native applications…

You can learn more about the Window Builder on the Eclipse site and install it into your Indigo release, link here.

Posted on by
Reply

In this next video in the series I show how eMarketing spots can be used to drive products, promotions, cross-sell, up-sell and content throughout your site. The easy to use interface of the Management Center enables non-IT business users to essentially define a large portion of the eCommerce site. This is another great feature that sets WebSphere Commerce above the competition. Using the rules based system and activities you can schedule content for specific demographics or have the content tied to the customer activity.

I love this series of posts…

Posted on by
Reply

One thing I really like is when a blogger does a series of posts. Even better when the posts are tagged together with a unique tag so its easily found and all of the posts related to the series are in a single list. The 12 Things You Shouldn’t Do on a Portal Project is such a series. This series was tagged with “12things”.

The series has been hitting PlanetLotus for about a month now and it has been a very informative series. Since it’s tagged, it is easily referenced for future use. Great job guys!

IBM – Smarter Commerce Summit

Posted on by
Reply

Register now!

Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2011

The Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2011 brings together a powerful combination of best practices, new technology and services, marketing and supply chain experts and industry perspectives into an event like no other. It’s one you can’t afford to miss. The event includes deep dives into:

  • e-commerce
  • supply chain management
  • behavioral marketing
  • mobile commerce
  • analytics and insight
  • change management

via IBM – Smarter Commerce Summit.

Top reasons why WebSphere Commerce is best of breed

Posted on by
2

Following my first video of WebSphere Commerce I really want to get across why WebSphere Commerce crushes the competition in two places.

The first area is in database performance and management with regards to extended sites. WebSphere Commerce uses a rules based system for things like catalog filtering, price rules, eMarketing spots etc. This means data is inherited from the hub site and optionally filtered or overridden on the extended site (or esite). This boosts data footprint and management of the data because there is only one data set. Data is not replicated to each extended site – where extended sites are generally used for multiple brands, different geographies, or locales.

The next area is the business process like user interface for content and rules. The easy to use rules user interface allows business users (non technical, IT staff) to pretty much run the entire site. Here is a screen shot of the rule builder for activities, which drive what emarketing content shows in an area on the site:

Click to make larger

 

The 6 hottest new jobs in IT

Posted on by
2

Great article on InfoWorld. As I get more and more acquainted with my new job, meet with customers and learn the business of eCommerce I am seeing this more and more. For instance, Business Architect is clearly a job role that could fill some gaps. It brings me back to my Marine Corp days where each developer on the supply system project (ATLASS) got supply certifications (an additional Military Occupational Specialty). We went through many classes to learn how supply management was done and in the end we were pretty good at the business side. This allowed the developers to truly understand the business needs of the application and in the end it resulted in an amazing application that was used for many years.

The 6 hottest new jobs in IT

via The 6 hottest new jobs in IT | Information technology careers – InfoWorld.

Is Eclipse fading away into the abyss?

Posted on by
8

As I read the Eclipse responses to the 2011 survey one thing that really stood out was the activity (or lack there of) in the number of respondents. The US continues to be second or third in the past two years with regards to number of respondents (maybe we are just lazy). I also would have thought, from a site which claims over a million hits per month that there would have been more than 624 people taking the survey. The survey count dropped from 1696 respondents in 2010 to just 624 in 2011 – I don’t think that’s a good thing for an open source community.

We believe a reason for the lower number of respondents is that some popular developer news sites in Germany and France had previously promoted the survey but did not promote the survey this year. This is evident by the decreased participation rate
in Germany (26% in 2010 vs 18% in 2011) and France (15% in 2010 vs 7% in 2011).

This year, the playing field seem to be leveled between Germany, France, and the United States with regards to survey respondents. But, as stated, the lack of promotion may be the cause. The US was at 16.8%, Germany reigns at 18.1% and France took a beating with only 6.9% of the respondents and India gained some ground to 5.6% – up 1.6% from last year.

Based on geographical area, Europe represented 58.9% of the respondents, North America 21.6%, and Asia 14.3%.

I also found it interesting that JQuery continues to win the popularity vote amongst developers for RIA frameworks:

Click to make larger

 

And a real shocker is the number of developers choosing Windows over the other platforms this year:

WebSphere Commerce, The power of extended sites – Part I

Posted on by
Reply

Today I am launching a series of videos to show how flexible and easy extended sites are with WebSphere Commerce.

First a brief introduction to extended sites:

Think of a large company that has many brands – even IBM for that matter, but it is easier to think of a large retailer. Just so we don’t mention any actual companies I am going to use a fictitious company called Madisons. This company is an eBay like store where you can buy many kinds of things. The company wants to launch a separate site called Madisons Wear for a new clothing line. They still want customers to be able to buy Madisons Wear line on the main site but this new site will have a new look and feel and be dedicated to the clothing line.

Continue reading →