StreamBase: Eclipsed

Well, as promised, StreamBase is starting to get even more developer-friendly. I’m sure some of you have seen the new and improved DevZone (notice the sane URL :) ). Well, now in the add-ons downloads section, we have put up a Java Toolkit for Eclipse.

Now, to be sure, this is not the StreamBase studio, which is a separate download. Instead, this little ditty makes it easy for your java developers to build up custom operators, functions, enqueuers, and adapters for your StreamBase application. The idea here is that the architecture (and SQL, using StreamSQL) people would use StreamBase Studio to design their real-time applications (to react and respond to streams and complex events) on what is basically a high-level. A look through the GUI shows you how easy that can be. The java heavy people who really don’t need StreamBase installed, and probably already have Eclipse (especially recently, btw, I’ve noticed more and more college grads simply raving about eclipse and java), to build you your custom operators and functions and things.

What does this mean anyway? Well, let’s say you’re trying to read in a stream of data coming in some format (let’s say XML) which StreamBase doesn’t natively read. You need to “adapt” that data stream to convert it into tuples that StreamBase will understand. The way to do that is to create an embedded adapter that starts and stop with the StreamBase server, and basically sits in front of the server. Adapters can also, by the way, be used for data output.

So, now, with the Eclipse plugin, it’s trivial for the Java developers to just create a new adapter and fill in the meat (ie, the code that will do their work) into the appropriate spots in the generated code in Eclipse. Easy-peasy pie.

I’m still exploring my way around this, but hopefully sooner rather than later, I will start to put some articles up on my learnings. It’s a really nifty platform to be working off.