If you're looking for Eclipse technology expertise, then you've come to the right place. At Ecliptical Software, we are passionate about Eclipse, Java, and Open-Source software in general. Whether you are a small start-up interested in leveraging the Eclipse platform and other Open-Source technologies, or an established industry leader with ongoing Eclipse projects, you need proven technological expertise and reliable advice to get your product to the market quickly yet cost-effectively.

Ecliptical Software is committed to delivering innovative, high-quality software solutions that are on time and within the budget. Visit our Services section to learn in more detail about what we do, the Technology section for information about the technology we use, and the Projects section for our publicly available tools and components. Feel free to Contact Us with any questions or to discuss what we can do for you.

At Ecliptical, software development is our bread and butter. We can develop small to mid-size business applications or development tools, and prototype or assist in creation of large-scale enterprise systems built on the Java platform. While we primarily focus on solutions that in one way or another involve the Eclipse technology, we have extensive experience in building J2EE-based enterprise applications and practical knowledge of domains such as insurance, banking, information security, commercial credit reporting, and on-line education. Please see our Technology section for information on the technologies we utilize in our solutions.

There is no particular formal methodology that we insist on -- in fact, we can easily adapt to the one preferred in your organization; however, we employ many principles of Agile Software Development to deliver incremental results that match your requirements as they are refined throughout the development process.

If you're not quite certain or cannot decide if Eclipse is the right technology for your project, we can help you with that, too. And in spite of our passion for it, you can rest easy knowing that we won't try to push Eclipse onto you. Being the expert in a technology also requires knowing its limits and being able to recognize when it does or does not fit a particular problem.

We consider knowledge-sharing and skill transfer to be an implicit deliverable in projects involving your own software development resources. In addition, we can provide explicit training of your in-house resources in the various Eclipse technologies and development techniques useful in building successful solutions.

If you're just getting started and don't have all the necessary infrastructure in place, we will be happy to set you up with a managed CVS or SVN repository for your project artifacts, an automated build, testing, and publishing of your releases, and provide access to a host of other collaboration tools, such as Bugzilla, wiki, or development blogs. We use phpCollab for project management and collaboration with clients.

Eclipse is a rich client platform, a tool integration platform, and a host of related tools and technologies. It is actually more of a phenomenon than just technology. It has united (and continues to) arch-rivals such as BEA, Borland, IBM and others around a common platform -- something that is difficult to accomplish even through independent standard bodies. Eclipse is commercial-quality software with an Open-Source development and distribution model, and its growing rate of adoption as well as availability of more tools and solutions is a testament to the success of this model. It's the wide range and ubiquity of high-quality Open-Source tools and platforms such as Eclipse that made it more cost-effective to develop custom software to fit your particular problem domain than to try to fit your problem into an existing, pre-packaged, proprietary solution.

In addition to the base platform, we utilize Eclipse technologies such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and Web Tools Project (WTP) to deliver reliable, maintainable software faster than has ever been possible.

Open, extensible platforms such as Eclipse are suitable for applications that consist of a variety of components, both desktop and server-side. Complex, enterprise-scale applications benefit from both rich clients and thin clients collaborating with components deployed on high-performance servers. The Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform is ideal for large-scale, extensible systems and has become the de-facto standard in the corporate world.

At Ecliptical, we are capable of delivering server-side solutions compatible with any J2EE standard compliant architecture, but most notably IBM's WebSphere Application server backed by the DB2 database system.

While we consider Eclipse and J2EE to be the primary technologies in our solutions, there is a host of other Open-Source Software that allows us to deliver high-quality software at a lower cost. These include:

• Apache Jakarta projects (Commons, Ant, Struts, and others)
• Apache XML projects (Xerces, Xalan, Axis, and others)
• JBoss, Apache Geronimo, Tomcat, and more
• Databases, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Apache Derby
• Scripting languages, such as PHP, Python, and JavaScript
• Cygwin and other GNU Tools
• Linux, FreeBSD
• ...and more

This project serves as an umbrella for small tools and solutions that help improve the developer's productivity while working on EMF-based software. Currently, the available packages include:

• Simple Compare for EMF
• JDT Extensions for EMF
• Find/Replace for EMF Editors
• Ecore Common Navigator extension
• Content Type support for EMF
• XML Processing Instruction support for EMF

Visit the emf.bits project page to find out more.

The goal of this project is to provide a library (and a wrapping plug-in) with support for using the XPath language to navigate arbitrary Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) models. It uses Jaxen as the underlying XPath engine, with a custom document model adapter that allows it to navigate EMF object graphs using XPath constructs. This is useful in many scenarios, such as object graph validation, searching, and so on.

Click here to visit this project's home page.

This project aims to provide EMF-based models for representing various content syndication formats, such as the Atom Syndication Format, the Really Simple Syndication format, and more. It takes advantage of EMF's ability to represent extensible XML content as a hybrid object model -- the recognized parts are accessible using strongly-typed accessors while any unrecognized extensions are preserved and accessible using EMF's reflection API.

This project's home page is available here.

This small project is an Eclipse plug-in that provides a preview of HTML documents edited using Eclipse Web Tools Project's (WTP) HTML Editor, which by itself does not provide this feature. To see a live preview of the edited document, click the "Show Preview" button. This will open an Eclipse view with the latest saved version of your document displayed in the browser. The view will refresh every time you save the editor.

The website for this project is currently being developed and will be available soon. In the meantime, the latest release is available for download here. To install it, simply extract the downloaded archive into your Eclipse installation directory.

Castor Plug-in for Eclipse is an Open-Source project whose goal is to integrate Castor, specifically the Castor Source Generator tool into the Eclipse workbench. This allows developers who use Eclipse as their Java IDE to invoke the generator from a user-friendly, familiar environment, rather than shell or Ant scripts.

This project is hosted on SourceForge.net. Click here to visit its home page.

The Eclipse RSS Reader allows the user to create RSS channels, connected to on-line RSS feeds, and view the items they contain in several workbench views. Each channel can be updated from its source at regular intervals. The channel items can be browsed using configured link browsers. Because the Eclipse RSS Reader is built on the Eclipse platform, it has a number of advantages over other solutions.

This project is hosted on SourceForge.net. Click here to visit its home page.

Ecliptical Software Inc. is an independent software vendor founded in 2005 in Toronto, Ontario. Its founder and the principal consultant, Peter Nehrer, is an Eclipse and Java/J2EE expert with ten years of experience in the software development industry. He is the author and contributor to several Eclipse-related Open Source projects. Peter is an IBM Certified Enterprise Developer for WebSphere 5, IBM Certified Solution Developer for XML and Related Technologies, and holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, MA. Click here to see his full resume.

We are more than happy to discuss your software development needs with you. Here is how to get in touch with us: