ECT 4

The Extensible Coordination Tools (ECT) are a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse IDE which are centered around the coordination language Reo. In the past, the ECT were hosted in a Subversion repository at the CWI Amsterdam. Since most of the ECT developers are no longer working at the CWI, we decided to manage the source code with a third-party provider for open source projects. ECT is now developed as a project at Google Code. We hope that this will open the project for new developers and make the tools more accessible to external users.

With the new home of ECT comes also a new build infrastructure and a new update / release strategy. We now deliver continuous updates so that we can more quickly react on problems or bugs. To reflect the new philosophy also in the version numbers, the new version of ECT is 4.0.0.X (where X is a date-based qualifier). Hence the name ECT 4.

To install ECT 4, please first make sure that you uninstall any old ECT versions. For this, click on Help - About Eclipse - Installation Details. Then uninstall all Reo features with versions below 4.0.0. To complete the uninstall process, restart Eclipse. Then you are ready to install ECT 4. Just point the Eclipse update manager to this URL: http://reo.project.cwi.nl/update. This is in fact the old ECT update site URL. Select the features you want to install and follow the installation instructions. Once you have upgraded to ECT 4, you can install updates as usual by clicking on Help - Check for Updates.

Note that the Distributed Engine feature is now part of the Reo Core Tools. Also, the conversion tools do no longer include the BPMN convertor because it required out-dated packages. We hope that we can migrate the BPMN converter soon to the new BPMN2 Modeler tools.

If you would like to get in touch with the development of ECT 4, you can check out the source code at our ECT project at Google Code. If you want to follow the news on ECT, you can subscribe to our mailing list. This is also the best place to ask questions or to get in touch with the developers.

Last but not least, here are some stats about ECT 4. I used the cloc script to count the lines of code.

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Language       files       blank     comment        code
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Java            1400       34962       83922      142259
Scala             63        1486        3063        6845
XML               45         316          40        3819
JSP               14         148          50         531
Bourne Shell       2         114          28         260
C                  4          59          14         250
CSS                2          18           0          79
C/C++ Header       3          21           8          78
make               1          15           8          62
Javascript         1          10           1          32
HTML               2           4           0          25
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SUM:            1537       37153       87134      154240
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