Volume 1, Issue 1 - April 2008

Inaugural Edition of the Skyway Community Newsletter

   

Thank you for an outstanding month! Just over a month ago, at EclipseCon 2008, Skyway Software announced and launched the first beta of the open source version of Skyway Builder Community Edition (CE). We also launched our community site (www.skywayperspectives.org). A lot of work went into preparing Skyway Builder CE for EclipseCon, and it is exciting for us to see that the effort produced a lot of interest in our developer community.

Model-driven development and domain-specific languages (DSLs) are becoming more popular in the application development ecosystem, and Skyway Software's instantiation of these concepts for building web applications and services offers immediate benefit to application developers of all types. From technology enthusiasts to enterprise application developers, there is a growing interest in tools that expedite application development through modeling, particularly non-proprietary, open source and extendible development tools like Skyway Builder.

While EclipseCon was a major milestone for Skyway Software, the birth of a new open source project and community site is really only the beginning!

  

Join the Skyway Community

   
COMMUNITY NEWS  
   
Skyway Software at JavaOne 2008 (May 6-9)

This year's conference covers topics and content that are important to the Java technology community and continues to expand its program into areas that play well with Java technology, exploring the rich development platform available to all, including the following: Java EE, RIAs, Developer Tools, Open Source and Web 2.0. Skyway Software is a key sponsor of the event, so plan to meet with your Skyway Software Team in San Francisco.

In attendance at the Skyway Software booth (#102) will be:

  • Jared Rodriguez - Co-founder of Skyway Sofware, CTO
  • Sean Walsh - CEO
  • Jack Kennedy - Co-founder of Skyway, Vice President of Product Delivery
  • Michael Weaver - Principal Architect
  • Niel Eyde - Director of Community and Product Management
  • Dave Meurer - Customer Enablement Manager

Stop by the booth for a tshirt and a chance to win an IPOD.

May 6-9, 2008
Moscone Convention Center
San Francisco, CA
 
Skyway Software is SpringSource Certified
Skyway Software is the first application-delivery ISV certified by SpringSource.  Rod Johnson commented "I am impressed with the ability of Skyway Visual Perspectives to build and deploy highly scalable Spring Framework applications quickly and easily. We look forward to working with Skyway Software and its powerful suite, Skyway Visual Perspectives, to further the pervasiveness of the Spring Framework as a standard within the IT community."  Check out the announcement for the full details.
 
Notable Notes from EclipseCon 2008

>> Ed Merk, leader of the Eclipse Modeling Project and Eclipse Community "Top Ambassador" award winner, blogged about a demo we gave to him at EclipseCon.  He commented that Skyway Software has "really tapped into the potential of model driven development".  You can read his blog posting here.

>> Eric Rizzo, a consultant at Skyway Software, won the Eclipse Foundation's Top Newcomer Evangelist award.  We are very fortunate to have Eric on the Skyway Software team. Congratulations, Eric!
 
We need your feedback!
Have you downloaded and installed Skyway Builder CE? Are you a community member who has used our Support materials and documentation? Do you have ideas on how we can improve the Skyway Builder CE product or skywayperspectives.org website? We want to hear about your experiences with Skyway! Send us your feedback via our forums or email.
     
DEVELOPMENT NEWS    
     
Skyway Builder CE Beta 2 Release    
We have released the 2nd beta of Skyway Builder CE, which incorporates new functionality, bugs fixes, and improvements based on community feedback.  You can download beta 2 from the community site.
    
     
New Resources: Sample Project, Tutorial and Sandbox Setup Guide    

To jumpstart the learning and use of Skyway Builder, our first sample project, First Skyway Bank, is now available.  If you visited our booth at EclipseCon, First Skyway Bank was the running application used to demonstrate model-based development with Skyway Builder. You can download the application from the community site. We are also in the process of preparing more sample projects to publish.  If you have an application developed with Skyway Builder that you think would be helpful to the community, please drop a note under Sample Projects on the forums.

Two additional resources are also now available. We have published our first tutorial that introduces new users to application development using Skyway Builder, and while we expect users of Skyway Builder will be familiar with setting up their application server and database in Eclipse, we've published a sandbox setup guide to help developers in setting up Tomcat and MySQL.

    
     
Forums - Stay in touch    
Did you know that the Skyway Forums are RSS enabled?  Each forum and thread has an RSS Feed that you can use to be notified of new posts or replies.  If you want to track all forums, we have also created a single aggregated RSS feed that combines all the individual forum feeds.  In addition to the RSS feeds, a registered Skyway Community member can also subscribe to categories or threads, in which case you will be notified via email when a new post or reply is posted.  This is particularly useful when you want to be immediately notified of a reply to a thread initiated by you.