Are you ready for EDT?

The EGL Development Tools Project (EDT) has been proposed for Eclipse. Are you ready?

EGL is IBM's Enterprise Generation Language. EGL can do a whole bunch of different things well. It is a language that runs in your favorite browser. It is a language to build platform-independent desktop applications. It is a language to build web service applications in Java EE. It is a business-oriented language for a IBM z mainframe and IBM i5/OS. It is not COBOL, but generates COBOL. It is not Java; but it generates to Java. It can use Java objects. It is not JavaScript; it generates to JavaScript. It can use JavaScript libraries, such as Dojo.

IBM has already given us the EGL Community Edition. It is free license software. It is an Eclipse-based IDE with tooling to build browser applications and web services. Or, you can add EGL tooling to your existing Eclipse.

Recently, IBM has proposed a new project for Eclipse to bring the EGL Community Edition to open source. Are you ready to download the source code as soon as it is available? Are you ready to build the tools from its source code? Have you installed the tools you'll need?

The EDT project aims to build a generator framework to open up EGL to more solutions. First, there is work to be done to develop a generator framework. Current versions of EGL do not have a proper API for the collection of generators, such as JavaScript, Java and COBOL. Some refactoring is needed. Do you have your test plan ready?