Total Eclipse of the Heart
May 21st, 2007
I’m going to be forty in October and still haven’t found someone that I’d like to share an afternoon with, let alone a lifetime. When I was in my twenties my poor mother threatened to place an ad in the Malahide Parish Bulletin to find a match for me, but fortunately for me she never followed through on her threat. I sometimes wonder if modern mothers list their unmarried kids on match.com. I know if my mom were more techno savvy that I’d probably find myself on there. I’ve been playing matchmaker for Ingres for the past year and a half - looking for a partner worthy of my beloved Ingres. Now of course Ingres and OpenROAD complement each other perfectly, but we’re looking outside the family also. As is usually the case with these things, we found the perfect match for Ingres totally by accident - Eclipse. We’d been considering various suitors; C#, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby and Java and paired each of them up with Ingres. Within seconds of seeing Ingres with Eclipse I could tell that it was a match made in software development heaven.
The beauty of the Eclipse IDE is that it has a large community of very talented application developers behind it, and they’ve built the perfect environment for application development that works across most operating systems. The plug-in architecture and ease of extensibility means that what is possible within Eclipse is limited only by the imagination. Developers using Ingres as their application development platform can do so with the confidence that the database can scale to support the largest enterprise.
The Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) provides data based application developers with everything they need to interact with the database from the Eclipse IDE. The DTP provides the ability to browse all kinds of database objects, from tables and views to database events and procedures. There’s rarely a reason to ever have to leave the IDE. My own favorite feature is the syntax highlighting when editing database procedures, as well as the fact that it retains formatting and I can execute the procedure from within the IDE.
We recently attended the EclipseCon Conferences in California and Germany and have been struck by how similar the Eclipse and Ingres Communities are. Both are very technical and have an emotional attachment and sense of ownership around the technology. Last week our application to join the Eclipse Foundation was accepted and we look forward to becoming active contributors.
To get you up and running quickly with Ingres and Eclipse we’ve bundled together everything you need and included a simple set of instructions to ensure your success. You’ll find this bundle at: http://ingres.com/downloads/prod-comm-dev-tools-download.php.
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