One of my colleagues - Robin van Breukelen - is a graduation student at the Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen (www.han.nl). For his graduation project, he is currently working on the implementation of a plugin for Eclipse, that will allow you to manage the GigaSpaces runtime from your IDE. The goal is to give developers an even friendlier developer-experience to GigaSpaces.

Some of the key-functionality that we already delivered is the following:

• View the Grid Service Agents (GSA's), Managers (GSM's), Containers (GSC's) and Lookup Services.
  
• Starting and stopping the above components, either embedded in the IDE, or externally as separate processes.
• View the Processing Units and Spaces.
• Deploying and undeploying Processing Units.
• Launching Processing Units embedded in the IDE, through dedicated launch configurations for this.
• Managing more than one GigaSpaces installation through the Eclipse-preferences.
  

In essence it means we're rebuilding part of the GigaSpaces Management UI, however, since we're using the new Admin API of GigaSpaces 7.0, this is quite trivial. This API allows you to retrieve information on running components, and administer these. Building the Eclipse Widgets actually turns out to be the hard part.

We've abstracted the GigaSpaces installation from the view that is being rendered, so support for new versions of the product will be very easy to incorporate.

Here is an image of the Eclipse view:


This is what the Preferences window for GigaSpaces installations looks like:


And a specialized Run Configuration for Processing Units:


I am very enthusiastic about these new developments - and although we're only in the fourth Sprint of the development cycle Robin has already created some impressive work. Once the projects has reached a mature stage, we will start releasing the components to the public.

In fact, there is more stuff coming that will be even more compelling - stay tuned!

Jeroen