Amazon announced today the availability of its Mobile App SDK Eclipse Plugin. The software is currently in beta, but it should “increase your productivity in developing apps and games for distribution on Amazon.” It works by generating the “appropriate config entries for the APIs you select,” and then “copies over the relevant API jar files.” Amazon says you can also use the tool to quickly undo API integration without affecting the original Eclipse project.

Here’s some more additional details about Amazon’s new Eclipse plugin:

If you need help in obtaining the Eclipse plugin, hit up Amazon’s help site. It has all the information you need. If you’re feeling especially helpful, you can also fill out this survey on what you think of the product in its current beta form.

The eclipse, which follows an 8,500 mile path across the heavens, will last for nearly three-and-a-half hours during the late afternoon. Unfortunately, depending on where you are at the time it occurs, the event may be witnessed for two glorious hours to five brief minutes. Those who live on the Eastern Seaboard will be completely in the dark, though you can check out the event in its entirety by logging on to various websites that will be streaming the eclipse live.

Other areas will only see partial eclipse, while others will be able to see the moon cover nearly 95% of the sky. The locations hosting viewing parties for the latter are Petroglyph National Monument, Redwoods National Park, Lassen Volcanic National Park, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Zion National Park, and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

Of course, if you’re going to watch the eclipse as it unfolds, then you’re going to need some sort of protection. Looking at the ring of fire directly may result in severe eye trauma, which means that you may not be able to look at another thing for as long as you live, let alone an eclipse. Your best bet, assuming that you can readily locate a pair, are wielder’s glasses with a number 14 filter. Can’t find any? Don’t stress about it — just punch a small hole in a cardboard box and you’ll be on your way. Remember: Skywatch responsibly, folks!

For added fun, listen to this song on repeat until the eclipse is over.

The two features added to the plugin include “Tooling for using Java Persistence API to access Cloud SQL” and “Importing the latest Google APIs into your GPE project.” The two updates will bring a “richer” coding and tooling experience for developers working on these programs.

The Java Persistence API introduces Object-Relational Mapping for accessing relational databases. The new plugin adds these tools to Cloud SQL and the Google App Engine. If you are in a GPE project, JPA can be enable and configured as a project facet.

The new Google Plugin for Eclipse also offers access to all the new Google APIs. They can be accessed easily with a simple click. You can also download the Google API Java client library to grant access to Google APIs from within the App Engine project. It also features update notifications so that you can keep track of any new versions of the various APIs.

The next update to the App Engine SDK will include a notification within Eclipse that will notify you of the latest updates to the App Engine SDK.

If you want to start coding right away, GPE 2.6 is available for your downloading pleasure right now. Eclipse users will want to take advantage of all of the new Google APIs.

Original Article: YouTube announced that it will be streaming the red carpet footage of the Twilight: Eclipse premiere this evening. It’s that big a deal.

"The scene from Hollywood may look nothing like Forks, but all of your favorite vampires and werewolves will be there giving live interviews and greeting fans," says YouTube’s Thomas Henry. "Many of these Twilight faithful have been waiting for up to three days in order to catch a glimpse of their favorite pale-faced friends."

The coverage starts at 5:30 p.m. PT tonight. Watch it here.

If you can’t tune in live (and you still actually want to see it), you will still be able to watch the footage on the Twilight YouTube channel.

Learn about some online marketing strategies they’ve been using for this film here.

twi-hard noun
A serious/obsessive reader of the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer, one leap above Twilighters.

Are you a Twilight fan? Do you plan on seeing the movie? Let us know.

Currently the Twilight Saga is all the rage, and seems to have taken over almost every aspect of social media. If you venture over to MySpace.com you’ll see that the homepage has been New Moonified. It should be noted that New Moon & MySpace seem to share the same demographic, Tweens… so it only makes sense to try and grab those pageviews.

MySpace has been all about some New Moon here lately, as they just hosted an exclusive stream of the red carpet during the films premiere, which pulled in 3 million viewers. Did you watch any of the red carpet stream? Tell us.

Over on Twitter, Twilight holds 3 of the top 10 trending topics including the highly coveted top spot.

If you search for "New Moon" on Twitter it seems like you need to constantly refresh so you can see the hundreds of new Tweets. Below is an interesting graph, which shows the buzz over New Moon, comparing blogs to Twitter. You can obviously see the drastic climb just from last month, as the hype around the movie grew with each day.

YouTube is even trying to cash-in on the New Moon craze by adding a “Twihard” box atop their site that states the following, "The world is gripped by Twilight mania these days and on YouTube that translates into videos that celebrate, discuss and even mock the cultural phenomenon."

Like I said before, New Moon hits theatres today and is expected to make somewhere between 85 million – 100 million dollars this weekend, and could possibly break some box office records when it’s all said and done. It’s already broken the advance ticket sales record, previously held by Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. How much do you think New Moon will make when it’s all said and done? Tell us.

It’ll be interesting to compare New Moon’s "social media status" against the next film in the saga when it hits the cinema around this same time next year, to see if it stil has the same amount of hype around it.

Why do you think Twilight is such a huge success? Tell us know your honest opinion.

Frank Taylor writes on the Google Earth Blog, "Thanks to a some nice work by Michael Kosowsky of HeyWhatsThat.com, you can download a simple KML file that will let you use Google Earth Sky to view when and where tonight’s lunar eclipse will occur for your location."

"Fast, simple, and free! The KML file for Google Sky is simple to load, and it will automatically guess your location on the Earth by guessing the location of your IP address. Make sure you select the ‘Switch to Sky’ mode when Google Earth prompts you. Double click on the ‘HeyWhat’s That.com’ placemark to position your view on the moon."

Taylor says that based on your location, you will be able to view the green lines of a "planisphere" which illustrates your horizon in Google Sky. Taylor goes on to explain," Cardinal points showing north, south, east, west; the positions of the moon and planets; and a special symbol representing the Earth’s shadow relative to the position of the moon. Not only that, but the time slider will be visible and you can drag the slider to determine precisely when the eclipse will occur."

The last total lunar eclipse that could be visible from the United Sates happened on August 28, 2007. North Americans will have a chance to see the next total lunar eclipse on December 21, 2010.
 

This puts Google in close proximity to some other big companies, such as Intel and Motorola, which are already involved with Eclipse.

Intel and Motorola are “strategic members,” though, while Google is just an “add-in provider member.”

Still, Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, told ZDNet that “we are, of course, thrilled that Google decided to join the Eclipse Foundation.”

“It was a nice gesture of support for the Eclipse community and it is appreciated,” Milinkovich continued. “But what I am really excited about is the way that Google is using Eclipse as the development tools platform for the Google Web Toolkit. It is yet another demonstration of how Eclipse can be used as the tools platform for so many different languages and environments.”

It’s possible that Google could help Eclipse out in other ways, as well.

The foundation’s executive director told ZDNet that “It will be interesting to see if Google gets involved in some of the Eclipse projects related to Ajax such as ATF and RAP.”

Barbara Darrow noted that Google’s move, regardless of its level of involvement, puts some pressure on other corporations, including Microsoft.

“With Google’s entry, the ranks of Eclipse holdouts among key technology companies continues to shrink,” she wrote.

“Microsoft with its non-Java stack, remains outside the Eclipse sphere. And,” Darrow observed, “no one seems to expect Sun Microsystems to cowboy up for Eclipse, even though it moved more into open-source mode with its recent decision to put Java and related technologies into the General Public License.”

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“(while Red Hat) really haven’t gotten in the way”"the R&D really hasn’t benefited from a huge investment, which I was hoping for and was the main reason I went to Red Hat“

[UPDATED 2006-11-27: Eweek has a longer article on the Fleury interview here]

Well, if Marc was looking for an R&D bump, he should have calculated how much more Red Hat spends on SG&A (sales, marketing & administrative) vs. R&D compared to Oracle or other large IT vendors.

If Marc had done this, he’d have thought twice about Oracle.

But maybe he’ll get to experience that also

While JBoss and Red Hat feel each other out and Marc goes to the Red Hat executive team with his tin cup for R&D, the WAS CE team has been making significant strides against JBoss.

According to an Evans Developer Study of Eclipse users released in the summer, WAS CE usage with Eclipse grew from 0% in 2005 to 16%, compared to a growth of 13% to 19% for JBoss.

That’s nearly 3x faster growth for WAS CE than for JBoss.

Oh, and Apache Geronimo usage by Eclipse users grew from 1% use in 2005 to 14%, not bad eh?

Combined, 30% of developers using Eclipse said they developed against Geronimo/WAS CE compared to 19% for JBoss.

Goes to show you what a true open community (Geronimo) and IBM’s R&D efforts (WAS CE) can team up to do together.

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

I’d propose that one of the reasons is because IBM has a better grasp of how to work in a true open source community. The thing with Sun-backed OSS projects is that they are, by in large, Sun-(backed)-projects. There may be other vendors who participate in the community’, but everyone knows where the buck stops. This cannot be said for OSS projects that IBM participates in. Eclipse is the best example. Sure, IBM started the project and helped nurture the community during the early days, but does anyone think that Eclipse is an “IBM project”? Heck, how many people using Eclipse today even know about IBM’s initial and on-going involvement? What about Apache Geronimo? Last time I checked, IBM had 12 of 31 active committers from 20 companies working on the Geronimo project. I’m sure these numbers are growing with the greater adoption of Geronimo that we’re seeing.

True open source communities are efficient at selecting their own spokespersons and where their opinions will be voiced from (i.e. usually not a large IT vendor corporate blog). Companies who start open source’ projects that they seek to control need to install their own spokespeople. Luckily, IBM doesn’t fall into this group of companies.

Simply put, IBM does not represent Eclipse, Geronimo, Apache HTTP Server, AXIS, Linux or the hundreds of OSS projects IBMers participate in. If an IBMer is a thought leader in one of those communities, you’ll find his/her blog through that community I’m sure.

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

http://birthday.eclipse.org/

Who’d have thunk ita community kicked off with an IBM donation and early community building work by IBM would have the traction that Eclipse enjoys today. It goes to show you that an open community counts for more than a vendor controlled community’. The case with Sun owned/controlled NetBeans back when the NetBeans vs. Eclipse race was still up for discussion provides proof for the benefits of an open community. Maybe others could learn from the success of an open community backed project vs. vendor controlled open source projects.

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.