Eclipse Takes Root in Hawaii

A local user group is forming for Eclipse, an open source, Java development environment with an active and growing developer community. The Eclipse Hawaii User's Group, or eHug, is one of several regional communities devoted to Eclipse, and it is planning its first meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 16 at IBM's Honolulu office (1240 Ala Moana Blvd.).

The choice of venue is not coincidental:

The Eclipse Project was originally created by IBM in November 2001 and supported by a consortium of software vendors. The Eclipse Foundation was created in January 2004 as an independent not-for-profit corporation to act as the steward of the Eclipse community.

"Eclipse started as a Java IDE, but has since grown to be much, much more," notes the Eclipse Foundation. "Eclipse projects now cover static and dynamic languages; thick-client, thin-client, and server-side frameworks; modeling and business reporting; embedded and mobile; and, yes, we still have the best Java IDE."

For more information, check out the eHug informational page on the Eclipsepedia wiki (including slides from the group's organizational meetings) and a mailing list.

The group's coordinator is Greg Hester, CEO of Pacific Hi-Tech and a product manager at HMSA.