Web Development Live

The leading provider of the popular MyEclipse integrated development environment (IDE) and a founding and strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation, announced today the immediate availability of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 6.6. This release is focused on increased support and choice for customers standardized on Eclipse Europa (Eclipse 3.3).

This release includes the full implementation of Maven 2 for Eclipse tools, giving users the choice to utilize Maven in its native, “raw” format, or choose to utilize the fully integrated Maven4MyEclipse solution. This flexibility, along with other upgrades, provides users a wide range of options to fully manage application life cycles. Also included in 6.6 are updates providing maximum choice for JPA capabilities, including the addition of OpenJPA.

“We understand that many MyEclipse users are still standardized on Eclipse Europa for ongoing projects,” said Pete Carapetyan, product manager for MyEclipse. “We’re pleased to provide Europa legacy customers with upgrades that enhance their experience of MyEclipse, while not interfering with tool mandates or preferences.”

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Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group is expected to announce Thursday it has struck a deal to build a mixed-use luxury hotel and condo tower in Midtown Atlanta.

Tivoli and Mandarin Oriental’s intention to build a high-rise tower in the current lending environment comes as a surprising bright spot in a bleak economy. Details of the project’s financing could not immediately be confirmed, but if capital can be obtained for the project, it would defy severe odds, several hoteliers said.

“This is as brutal a financial market relative to getting debt and capital for projects as we’ve seen in a lifetime,” said one respected hotel industry source, who declined to identified.

Traditional lenders are strapped because of the credit crisis. One source said if Tivoli and Mandarin Oriental could tap into their own equity and cobble together financing from private equity funds or foreign capital, “then it can happen. That’s the only way it can happen.”

Landing Mandarin Oriental, world-renowned for its luxury reputation, would mark a major milestone for Atlanta’s hospitality community at a time when it is suffering through low occupancy rates and likely project delays due to the credit crunch, sources said.

Sources who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak said Atlanta architecture firm Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart and Associates Inc. would design the project. Hardin Construction Co. is the leading candidate to be the builder.

Atlanta Business Chronicle first reported in March 2007 that Tivoli Properties planned to build a Mandarin Oriental hotel in Midtown. About the same time, Mandarin Oriental moved its development offices to Midtown.

The design of the high-rise tower will likely not be the same as the 700-foot illuminated onyx skyscraper depicted in a rendering obtained by the Chronicle last year, several sources have said.

It is also unclear how many rooms, condos and how much retail space will be included in the final design.

Talk of the project has quieted in recent months. Representatives with Tivoli and Mandarin Oriental declined to discuss the companies’ plans when contacted last month by a reporter, saying only that a Mandarin Oriental had never been confirmed for Atlanta.

Horst Schulze, a dean of Atlanta’s hotel industry, a founder of the acclaimed Ritz-Carlton brand and current president of West Paces Hotel Group, said if Tivoli can obtain financing, it is a major coup for the city.

“If it will happen or not is a big question and I certainly hope it will,” said Schulze, who is not involved in the project. Financing for hotels has dried up globally, he said and even companies that can self-finance are taking a wait and see approach.

Mandarin Oriental, he said, is a new brand that “everyone will benefit from.”

The stretch of Peachtree Street and neighboring avenues, Mendheim said, forms part of the centerpiece of the Midtown Mile, with elite shops, restaurants and hotels similar to Chicago’s Michigan Avenue.

“Our little corner of the world is here and it’s quite extraordinary,” Mendheim said.

Mandarin Oriental enters the picture when several established hotels, such as the Four Seasons Atlanta, and new luxury players will already be in the Midtown marketplace.

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Phase One will showcase winter and holiday merchandise with innovative and market leading web experiences that will build market awareness of the unique offering of specialty sporting goods merchandise available in Sport Chalet stores.

Customers will be able to complete purchases online and have merchandise available for in-store pickup, or shipped directly from Sport Chalet’s vendors, its Distribution Center or its stores.

Craig Levra, Chairman and CEO, stated, “This has been in the works for a long time, and we are thrilled that our new ECommerce strategy will present the strength of the Sport Chalet brand and reinforce our position as the leading retailer of specialty sporting goods and services. A comprehensive strategy and a market leading online presence will allow us to take advantage of an opportunity to build awareness of our brand as we introduce Sport Chalet to broader markets. We are very cognizant of how we portray not only our brand but more importantly our core specialty vendor partners online, and that positioning must mirror the experience of shopping in our stores. Therefore, it is imperative that we offer our customers an exciting online experience that is meaningful and complements what we offer in our Sport Chalet stores. We expect our efforts will create stronger customer loyalty and drive traffic to our stores while at the same time increasing sales.”

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A leading Web content management solution provider, today announced that major Healthcare organizations are increasingly selecting CommonSpot to power their Web initiatives. Some of CommonSpot’s Healthcare customers include leading organizations such as Baptist Healthcare, Loyola Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University, Riverside Health, Sharp Healthcare, and St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System; as well as PaperThin’s newest customer Meridian Health.

Chris Ferris of St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System added, “St. Luke’s had thousands of pages of content to migrate as a part of a Web initiative to unite seven sites (including websites and intranets) onto CommonSpot, yet our Web group was very understaffed. CommonSpot was so easy to use that we were able to hire untrained volunteers to migrate all of our content which saved the organization both time and money.”

“What makes PaperThin successful with healthcare organizations is more than just the flexibility, and breadth and depth of CommonSpot it’s also our healthcare expertise and unwavering dedication to each customer’s ultimate success,” said Bob Cellucci, PaperThin senior vice president of sales and marketing.

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SpringSource has bought G2One, which provides training and support for the increasingly popular open source Groovy language and the related Web application development framework Grails. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SpringSource is the company behind the Spring framework for enterprise Java development. Grails is based in part on Spring and, like the popular Ruby on Rails Web framework, follows the philosophy of “convention over configuration” to boost developer productivity.

In buying G2One, SpringSource is betting that demand will grow for Groovy and Grails support and training. Groovy is being downloaded more than 30,000 times per month and Grails downloads are now 70,000 per month, according to SpringSource.

G2One’s small staff includes the leaders of the Groovy and Grails projects, which “will continue with a great deal of autonomy,” said SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson. SpringSource will hire additional staff and put resources into Grails tooling over time, he added.

Meanwhile, Groovy and Grails have become popular enough to spawn a magazine, GroovyMag, which recently published its debut issue.

“The primary value proposition of Groovy and Grails is that they allow developers to be more concise,” said the magazine’s editor, Michael Kimsal, a Raleigh, North Carolina, Web developer. “The language itself is more expressive, you get more functionality in fewer lines of code, and fewer lines of code means fewer bugs.”

Groovy’s similar syntax to Java is also appealing, he said, “People that already know Java know Groovy. It’s not a radical shift where you say, ‘Throw away everything you’ve done for the past five years.’ … that to me is the best benefit.”

“These are early times,” he noted. “This is definitely an early adopter community.” But Kimsal expects Groovy and Grails’ popularity to rise dramatically in 2009 and 2010.

“Honestly, I’m seeing a lot more interest in Ruby than Groovy at this point with the clients I talk to,” said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst with Forrester Research, via e-mail. “It may just be a different crowd that I talk to. That said, I think there is an undeniable rise in the level of interest around lean dynamic frameworks like Grails, Rails, the Zend Framework and others.”

Such frameworks are purpose built for Web applications that must create, read, update and delete information in conjunction with a database, making them “well suited for a large number of the types of apps developers build,” Hammond said.

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