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It’s been a while since Callisto has been announced. I don't have statistics about how many downloads happened for Callisto since first release. Most of you might know that, Callisto is collection of 10 most popular eclipse projects which will be released as a distribution. That really helps! In fact, I was waiting for such thing from so long.

Eclipse has hundreds of plugins and each of them has different dependencies. Once I tried to update WTP 1.0.7 in Eclipse 3.0.1 and every time it gave me a version mismatch error. I did not even know how to resolve the plugin version dependency! That was good example of plugin hell! The same feeling I had in Windows when it used to say XXX.dll has this version and you need XXX.dll with some different version. Now where I am supposed to get the newer version? I finally downloaded wtp-1.0.7-all.zip which has all things in-built from eclipse 3.1 to wtp latest version. Then I faced another problem, after downloading WTP, I had two versions of eclipse on my machine!

Callisto is good effort to address all such problems. Many times, I ask one of my team-member that, "Hey pal, you don't have xml editing feature installed in eclipse? Go get WTP and then it will allow you to edit/format xml in the editor." That guy spends almost half-day to build his workspace environment for editing couple of xml files. That’s even worse example of increasing productivity by using tools!

Now Callisto will give me one URL which should broadcast throughout my team and within couple of hours everybody's eclipse workbench will be restored to latest version of top 10 projects from eclipse.org. For those who don't know which are those top-10 projects here is the list:

• Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project
• C/C++ IDE
• Data Tools Platform
• EMF
• GEF - Graphical Editor Framework
• Graphical Modeling Framework
• Eclipse Project
• Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform Project
• Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project
• VE - Visual Editor

This was needed by eclipse from long time. One URL, one distribution and you are ready to go. Really it should be that simple!

I was wondering will it beat NetBeans. There are few things which NetBeans is doing good. Good examples would be Enterprise pack and Profiler. These packs integrate very tightly with NetBeans. WTP needs that simplicity. Be it anything, BPEL, Glassfish or your favorite relational database, they just get part of IDE! That’s really a great feature of NetBeans. Visual studio always has such kind of integration with all available tools. NetBeans has exactly delivered same power.

I like Xml Schema editor, Schema refactoring, Web Services development and lots of other features which are great! I tried almost each type of project creation in NetBeans since my last post. I must say, its worth to give a try to NetBeans by all those people who love eclipse.

No! No! No! I am not advocating NetBeans, I am just saying just try another project which is powerful, next-generation and perhaps best Java IDE on planet! And above all, it’s free! So get your latest copy of NetBeans, Enterprise Pack & Profiler and start working on that. Remember it’s just another open-source project so there is nothing I can give to this community than my praising words! Soon I will get involved in editor development of NetBeans. (My current schedule doesn't permit me to blog too )

Cheers Eclipse & NetBeans team! I really owe you a, "Thanks!”

Google researchers have published a paper (PDF) which was awarded as best paper in Euro Interactive Television Conference last week. The research says, with an audio clip recorded using simple computer microphone we can find relative web-content. They used this technique to demonstrate a simple audio clip from running conversion can find relevant web content. The ambient noise doesn’t hamper the search quality and accuracy. Amazing, I think, we are not very far when we could implement a voice / video & image search.
There are billions of phones which have capability to capture images, record sounds and video clips. Simplest use can be capture a photo of a person to whom you don’t know and send it to online search engines using web-services. Then the services will find the images which contain the person and you will have all the information about the person in seconds (provided he has public existence on web). Though this sounds like movie scene from Matrix or Mission Impossible but it’s very useful for guys like me who forgets people faces. (I have many incidents of talking to people to whom I don’t remember anymore and just pretend that I know them )

Another application is very important for me about audio search. I heard a music snippet from an online movie or some place and I don’t know what kind of music that is or any artist information. Now, how should I use search engines to find the song name, artist name etc. The online audio search may be very useful in this sense, send an audio clip and you will receive list of songs which contain that audio portion. Amazing… I am so much excited to see all these technologies in action.

Although there are couple of issues regarding media protection, online privacy and other things to be solved but compared to facilities gained by end user, those issues doesn’t seem big.

Let me clear in beginning, I am strong fan of Eclipse. I have been using Eclipse for past 3 years and its very powerful. I love it for whole lot of reasons which I can't mention here. In Javaone conference I heard a lot about cool NetBeans demos and features. I just thought to give a try to that. I was not hoping much from NetBeans. I installed IDE, enterprise pack & profiler. I created a simple web-application project. The integrated Glassfish / Sun App server really makes testing very easy. Just out-of-curiosity I clicked on debug button after placing a breakpoint in bean and surprisingly it allowed me to debug my web-application. Previously I remember, I used to spend lots of hours by writing log traces and analyzing them to debug application. Man, that’s really handy!Beyond that, UML modeling (both way), testing, Web-services & BPEL integration makes NetBeans a real powerful JavaEE IDE. Tons of wizards are available to perform typical coding / modification tasks. Its aware of Java 2, 5 & 6 syntax aware so it makes development easier for any version of Java. JSF & Struts are integrated so no worry for web developers.But I need to admit the editor of Eclipse is far rich than NetBeans. For everything else the NetBeans is just superb! Waiting for more in coming days.

I installed ubuntu 6.06 LTS on my machine. I was on the ride of happiness I liked everything, right from the starting sound to shutting down screen! Some notable features are -

• Package manager - This really helps. You can choose which packages / libraries to download / install and just download them. That really gives you lot of choice to work with.
• Device support - I experienced the seamless operation of many devices. My thumb-drive and digital camera were instantly installed and ready to use. No more website searching for drivers.
• DVD, Mp3 & other playback - Though I was required to download libraries to run non-free media formats, but that's OK. I could finally listen to my songs while I work

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I have been writing for a while on Blogger & JRoller. But, I wasn't able to continue for long. I needed a break! Finally I decided to settle down on WordPress. This time, I have planned my blog nicely. I will keep posting in each category on regular basis. I have lot of things to share and document. You can expect few articles on technology and some fun paragraphs from my life. Keep looking