Celebrating 10 years of Eclipse

10 years back another visionary decision was taken by IBM , by donating its $40 million worth of source code from Websphere Studio Workbench and forming the Eclipse Consortium. This initiation was actually taken by IBM in November 2001 with the goals of creating a “commercial industry standard , full featured, highly integrable architecture” IDE.

In January 2004, the Eclipse Foundation was started as an non profit organization to have a vendor neutral, transparent and open community. Furthermore in June 2004 Eclipse Foundation announced general availability of the royalty-free 3.0 release of the Eclipse Platform. This became a fantastic achievement of open source community as well as the java language itself. In September 30, 2004 J2SE 5.0 was released which is much powerful with much more features and I strongly believe that the release of eclipse 3.0 helped indirectly as another fact to its success story.

Why Eclipse so popular ?

• Architecture of Eclipse IDE is easily and massively extensible, so any number of development features and functionality can be included for the requirement.
  
  • instead of hard coding applications functionality eclipse uses an implementation of OSGi that employs plugins to provide the functionality.
    
  • Wide range of plugins also available which run on top its runtime system as well as inside the runtime system.
    
• Using, modifying distributing of Eclipse doesn't need to be paid. Eclipse releases under Eclipse Public License so it allows to do any of the above.
  
• Eclipse IDE available for many operating systems
  
• Eclipse IDE is advance as much as or more than any other commercial IDEs available in the market.
  
  • Many features has integrated to it
    
  • Frequent updates and research on going for new features and functionality
    
  • available not just for java also other languages like C/C++, cobol, php, pearl, python etc.
    

Where Eclipse stands today ?

After 10 years time Eclipse has achieved a major improvement and market share. Accomplishments that eclipse has gained is incredible and the community will be proud of them self silently. In terms of market share eclipse has achieved approximate figure of 65% considering all the java developers.

Eclipse foundation itself is a large community which consist more than 200 open source projects and more than 1000 committers. Also a considerable number of partner companies existing including featured partners like IBM, Nokia, SAP etc.

Galaxy Nexus, is it calling all possibilities ?

Google announced its new, long awaited Nexus phone, which is Galaxy Nexus instead of Nexus Prime as we heard once. New Galaxy Nexus is also coming with Google’s a new version of Android named, Ice Cream Sandwich. As per the Google official blog “Ice Cream Sandwich makes Android simple and beautiful, and takes the smartphone to beyond smart”.

But is it (Galaxy Nexus) really beyond smart with its new Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) ?

 Yes it is, Its a smart move and more of a sweetest move (All of their OS names came with name of sweets ) this time with ice cream sandwich with lot of eye candy. With the overall major UI change in google they have decided to reflect that also on Andriod too which is impressive. This simple UI and elegant design theories new will make Andriod a more beauty that tends to attract more stake holders to its market share.

Screen size is notable improvement with another smart move which is replacing physical buttons with software buttons that will be again screen area. Also quite a good improvement in terms of resolution 720 x 1280 pixels in 4.65 inch area provides a avg. of 316 ppi pixel density. Compare to Samsung galaxy SII its massive (~217 ppi pixel density) .

Allowing users to unlock their phones using face recognition (google says its smile recognition but it should have more depth in it as I believe) is the smartest among the Android 4.0’s new features.

New improved Voice recognition, voice command and interaction features also smart enough.

Ice Cream Sandwich also brings some much-needed improvements to Google's photography software, Also panorama brings its Camera Features to next level of rich photography. 

Is it really calling all possibilities ?

With Android Ice cream Sandwich Galaxy Nexus is smart enough, but I don’t believe its calling all possibilities as they mentioned in their combined product launch of Galaxy Nexus. Because comparing to some of other android phones (Galaxy S II, DROID BIONIC, Sensation XE) is way beyond the Galaxy Nexus or equal in terms of hardware and some other features as per below. Also most of them are released months back so its not suitable to say Galaxy Nexus calling all possibilities.

Significant Disadvantages of GALAXY Nexus compare to other competitive phones

• No new processor has introduced
  • The processor is 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 ? Why not the 1.5 Exynos 4212?
  • 1.5 Exynos is 30% more power efficient, capable of delivering 50% faster 3D graphics rendering, as well as the usual 1080p HD video recording/playback and HDMI 1.4 support.
• Screen is Super AMOLED, not Super AMOLED plus
• Slightly lower resolution photos (5 MP vs 8 MP)
  • Megapixels of a photograph is not just matter when it comes to picture quality, but still its slightly low in resolution
• Has no assisted GPS
• Has no memory card slot for external memory such as Micro SD, Micro SDHC
• Video no video output: Micro HDMI
  
  
  Here's the video of the Google | Samsung joined product launch of Galaxy Nexus, shared on YouTube by androiddevelopers