Eclipse and Java coders are being offered a helping hand with their component assembly challenges from a new company with a fledgling free service. The Web-based Cloudsmith service, from the company of the same name, is designed to streamline component assembly across multiple sources. It helps developers cobble components directly from..."the cloud" - that global pool of...

Cloudsmith, a company that started last month, provides an innovative Web service that acts like a catalog service for easing the process of sharing code over the Web....With rapid advances in the number and complexity of open-source projects, the new service helps users find and share code configurations, cutting down on the time it takes for users to assemble and get the code running themselves.

Meanwhile, a company called Cloudsmith, which launched in mid-November, is offering up a framework for "assembling software directly from the cloud," according to founder and CEO Mitch Sonies. "How do developers respond when components are coming from all over the place, when the codebase is no longer your own?" he asked. Cloudsmith provides a mechanism for mapping to various elements and creating a "virtual distribution" of software.

One early adopter is...Lomboz, an open-source Java application development tool. Naci Dai, Lomboz's chief scientist, said..."Many of our users combine our software with other open technologies to build their applications...Cloudsmith allowed us to capture the configuration our users prefer in the form of Virtual Distros...We are hoping that one day this approach becomes the only way of packaging and distributing our software".

Meanwhile, a company called Cloudsmith, which launched in mid-November, is offering up a framework for "assembling software directly from the cloud," according to founder and CEO Mitch Sonies. "How do developers respond when components are coming from all over the place, when the codebase is no longer your own?" he asked. Cloudsmith provides a mechanism for mapping to various elements and creating a "virtual distribution" of software.

It's hard for me to test out the Cloudsmith service behind my 56k-like connection (currently in Jakarta). All I know is that the Eclipse community is starting to have a lot of options in how it gets its Eclipse...

What's kinda nice about the Red Hats of this world is that they pre-assemble a large collection of software components for you as a full Linux system. What's nice about Cloudsmith is that if you build your own interesting set of software components, then you can publish that configuration at Cloudsmith.

This is a really cool idea with loads of potential...for the longest time there have been efforts to share Technical IP at the configuration level in such a way as the cream of these efforts (read, best practices) rises to the top. This is the first time I think someone has cracked the code on this effort.