Eclipse is turning 10 years – and we have been in a mood to celebrate it. We have been involved in a lot of Eclipse related events in the past, but wanted to do something special this year.

If you are in Boston, come join us next week. We will be having free pizza, beer and even a birthday cake. We will have a bunch of people who really know Eclipse inside-out and will be showcasing a bunch of the cool technology being built these days.

Time and Location: We have planned to have the event on 17 November 2011 at 6:30PM, at Constant Contact, (Reservoir Place, 1601 Trapelo Road, Waltham, MA 02451 – see on map).

Here’s what you’ll get to see in this month’s Eclipse Demo Day:

CodeMaps.org – by Architexa

Architexa will demonstrate CodeMaps, a site built to help developers to easily understand Open Source projects from their web browsers, and the result of the exploration can be documented and shared online.

Code Sight Code Search – by Black Duck

Black Duck will demonstrate Code Sight, a free code search tool developers can use for their everyday search needs. This short demonstration will include searching and filtering capabilities that make finding code easier.

Open Source Jenkins CI – by CloudBees

CloudBees will show you how to use open source Jenkins CI to leverage agile development. Additionally, you can manage your development work and projects – all from within the Eclipse IDE, using the free plugin provided by CloudBees!

Orion Demonstration – by Eclipse

Eclipse will give a short demonstration of Orion, an online editor that runs in the web browser using javascript. Unlike other attempts at creating browser-based development tools, this is not an IDE running in a single tab. Links work and can be shared.

Eclipse Apricot Project – byNuxeo

Nuxeo will present the Eclipse Apricot project and introduce how to develop content-centric applications with Apricot project and with the Nuxeo IDE Eclipse plugin.

 

If you want to hear more information, you can visit Eclipse Demo Day or contact Sarah at sgerrol@blackducksoftware.com.

You can register for the event at Eclipse DemoCamps November 2011/ Boston.

 

Today Architexa’s “Working With Large Codebases” blog has posted it’s 50th post. While not a huge number, we are excited to see the response to so many of our articles for helping developers work with Eclipse, with agile teams, use design patterns, and document and communicate ideas  with developer tools and diagrams.

Architexa has been working on the performance of our diagramming tools, and conducting user studies to find more about what it takes for a developer to understand code. We have also been improving our Open Source documentation site codemaps.org.

With all the articles out there helping developers understand code, we were wondering what type of information you would like to see more of?

photo credit: Imagery by Pete

We are looking forward to providing much more interesting content in the coming months. Please let us know what you would like to see. Send us your favorite articles from our site or across the web.

We are working hard to help developers easily understand and document code. One thing that we have noticed is that the open source community continually faces challenges in these areas. New developers join projects frequently and at times committers have to leave a project. Without quality documentation code can quickly deteriorate.

We are great supporters of Open Source Software and have wanted to contribute by making it easier for developers and the community to document their code. As of today, we are providing free licenses for the Architexa Suite to those willing to upload good documentation, add comments, and vote on good diagrams every week. We will also appreciate it if you can give us feedback on what would make the Architexa Suite more useful for you.

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The great part about being a coder is that we like building software that will make a difference. And not just that, we like taking on hard development challenges to build out simple solutions. Bringing these solutions to those that can benefit from them is another challenge in itself; one that many developers often have not had any experience with. Sure you can throw your code up on source-forge and hope people find it but if you really want to change the world you often have to put in a little more. read more »

One of the nice things about launching a tool is the opportunity it allows in talking to our users. Over the last 3+ months we have spent a great deal of time talking to development teams about Architexa, and have gotten a great deal of insight not only into what they like and don’t like about Architexa, but more importantly, what pains they have felt. The consensus is clear: while developers do need to focus on coding on a day-to-day basis, to be successful on a long term they need to worry about the parts of the system that are shared between team members. These worries where what we focused on for the most recent release (v2) or Architexa.
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We have had a wild ride the last two months – which is why I have unfortunately not been able make many posts recently. Since we launched in June, the response for Architexa has been great, and after getting invited to apply for MassChallenge we entered into one of the largest startup competitions ever with around 500 entrants. Three months and a lot of mentoring later, we emerged as runner-ups. Yes, being selected as one of the top startups at MassChallenge is great, but wow, did we learn a lot!

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After years of hard-work, we are extremely happy to be opening the doors to let everyone in to see our work.

We have been working hard so that programmers can easily work with large codebases – whether it is in making sense of the code that you have, documenting it, or just discussing it with team mates. You will notice that we have built a set of powerful but easy to use diagramming tools. We believe these tools will help you and your team work more effectively.

We are confident that you will find Architexa helpful in your coding tasks. We also want to make sure you are happy with using the Architexa Suite – so we do have a free 30-day trial that you can use. Additionally, as part of the launch we are offering an really big 50% discount for those who purchase a license in the next month.

Come on in!! Try the software, and most importantly, let us know what you think.

We’ve had a great response so far! Here are a few of the things people are saying…

A Better View of Code

“Dr. Dobb’s: Vineet, tell us about the product you’re launching.

Sinha: Architexa, which is the name of the company we’ve launched, was created to help members of development teams have a better view of the important aspects of the code — this includes not just seeing how the high-level components depend on one another, but also in understanding the core of a system (how the main classes interact with one another), and even the most important use cases.“

Architexa aims to make UML quick and easy

“Architexa is a new Eclipse-based UML modeling tool that allows developers to quickly gain insight into code relationships through UML diagrams, and share what they find with others.  The key to fast exploration of the code base is to provide 3 farmiliar diagram types to developers (layered, class and sequence diagram) and allow developers to build up the relationships and granularity as they explore and understanc the code base.“

Architexa: Get To Know Your Code Better

“As a startup letting people into the site has been useful. It has been great to hear from users as to what they have found to be challenging while working on their own codebases, and we have been really happy that what we are building aligns with their needs.“

Architexa builds modeling tools for developers

“Interactive and diagrammatic exploration tools were what people needed. The diagrams generated in existing UML tools show too much information, and there is little support for developers to explore and find the right information that they care about, he explained.
Traditional Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools focus heavily on design and code generation, but Sinha said UML can also be used to focus on communicating, verifying and understanding code, which was missing during his days at Microsoft.
“

Over the last two weeks, we here at Architexa have been overwhelmed by the positive response to our vision (see video on our homepage). At JavaHispano Abraham talked in spanish about (translated)

… always liking to use UML to understand and navigate source code that is not mine and that I have to change. Or even my old code that I can not remember exactly how it is organized. However, I have never been able to create a lot of UML diagrams and use them to generate the skeleton code. So my pattern of use of these tools fits well with the philosophy of Architexa.

He went on to say that

The difference with all the [Architexa] tools is that they are designed to “surf” the source code through UML diagrams, so that one may be viewing more or less detail as you need. It is not an all or nothing, which is usually the case with\ traditional UML tools.

A poll trying to find if developers let their UML/design diagrams go stale, recognized that “sometimes it can be too much work to go back and update diagrams once the coding process is underway, especially when under a tight deadline”. It found that over 2/3rd developers noticed that with today’s tools their diagrams go stale with them falling back to their code.

One of the editors at JavaLobby, James Sugrue, did an an interview and talked about how Architexa makes life easy for developers. He talks about seeing a huge potential in our tool “for helping out with code reviews, or for getting into a new code base”.

In the Social Media world, it was nice to be referred to as the next generation of UML tools:

Since exiting the beta, we have been encouraged by the response and are letting people in to use the suite as fast as we can. We want to make sure developers have a great experience with our suite and we want to provide a great level of support while doing that.

We will be releasing additional videos and information on the product soon in addition to the (hopefully) informative content you’ve come to expect.

We have been extremely frustrated with UML tooling in the past, and for the last 2+ years we have been building something very cool. See the video below:

Can’t see the video? Click here
Most UML Tools focus on creating diagrams before coding, but we believe in having diagrams made from code. Where other tools require months of work to get something useful, we want to get you useful results in minutes if not seconds. Some tools require reading lots of documentation to use, but we have wanted a tool that you can get up to speed in 5 minutes.

What do you think of it?
(interested? sign up and use on our homepage)

Here at Architexa, we have been hard at work on an exciting new vision – one that we believe will make our lives as software developers much easier. As our software has grown into a powerful suite of developer tools, we have been wanting to share our ideas with you, and also hear what you think about what we’re doing. We decided to launch this blog so we can better communicate with YOU: the software developers who inspire our work! Check in frequently to see what we’re up to. Your feedback is really important for what we do, so tell us what you think: what you like, what you don’t like, and where you think we should be headed. Also let us know if you have any tips that other developers might benefit from – we will put them up.

Welcome to Architexa blog! We look forward to connecting with you!