This meeting’s theme: Programming

Eclipse IDE presented by Dan Juliano

• http://www.eclipse.org
• UI layer runs on top of SWT libraries, so it should be more responsive.
• Engineered differently than most other IDEs
• Fairly memory-intensive. Just launched, it took 135 MB of RAM on Dan’s demo system (an Intel Mac).
• IBM has put a lot of support behind this project.
• Primarily supports Java development, but there are versions and plugins for other languages.
• Aptana http://www.aptana.com is an online web dev environment that fits nicely with Eclipse.
• Good code validation plugin which will validate various languages.
• Standard IDE stuff like syntax highlighting.
• Has a large undo feature that remembers every change made since you started the session and can revert to any point. That causes a lot of the memory usage.

Several random discussions took place at this point in the meeting.

Hudson (https://hudson.dev.java.net/) presented by Dan Juliano

• Billed as an “Extensible continuous integration engine”
• Tons of plugins.
• Dan exploring using this for automated scheduled jobs as a replacement for doing the same with cron.

Several members of the group adjourned to Hessen Haus for food and beverages.