Wanted: More EclipseRT Awards Nominations

We are in the midst of judging the product categories for the Eclipse Community Awards.  It turns out we received only two nominations for the EclipseRT Application category.   The judges have decided they would like to see more nominees, so we have re-opened nominations in this category until February 17 at 5pmET.

This is a new category for the Eclipse Awards so some clarification might be in order.   If you are building an internal application, commercial product or open source project that uses any of the EclipseRT technology you can send in a nomination.   For example, if you have built a killer web application using RAP or a great server application using Equinox, Jetty and EclipseLink or a SOA application using Swordfish or your using SMILA or ….

I know there are a lot of applications and products using EclipseRT technology.  The nomination process is pretty easy and this is your opportunity to garner the fame and prestige of an Eclipse Community Award winner.  Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Top Marks for PDT

Congratulations to the Eclipse PDT team for their top score on the recent InfoWorld review of PHP IDE’s.  Out of 8 PHP IDE’s reviewed, PDT tied for top marks.    The other top IDE was  Zend Studio, of course based on Eclipse.

The PDT project team and Zend have done a fabulous job creating a world-class IDE for PHP developers.  Eclipse is clearly doing well in the PHP developer community thanks to their work.

Help Spread the News about e4

The 1.0 release of e4 is planned for July 2010.   Obviously, this is an important milestone for the Eclipse community.  The e4 development team is doing a great job building the next generation Eclipse platform.  However, as we all know, any new technology also needs evangelism, education and promotion.

People are already creating some compelling e4 tutorials, demos and presentations.   I am hoping that a coordinated effort might accelerate the material we have available when e4 is launched in July.   Therefore, I have started an e4 Evangelism page on the e4 wiki.  The idea for this group is to create 1) a consistent set of messages, 2) a repository of content produced or expected to be produced and 3) a community to brainstorm new ideas.  We are also going to host month conference calls for anyone interested in helping to spread the new about e4.  The first call will be this Thursday at 20:00CET, 2pmET/11amPT.   Call-in numbers are on the wiki page.   I hope you can join us.

Nominations for Eclipse Community Awards 2010

What do the following people have in common?  Ed Burnette, Linda Watson, Alain Magilore, Chris Aniszczyk, Kimberley Peter,  Tim Schindl, Ed Merks, Dainel Megert, Remy Chi Suen, Eric Rizzo,  Nick Boldt, Paul Webster,  and Benjamin Cabe.

Or the following products: Gumtree, Lombardi TeamWorks, RadRails, BEA Worksship Studio, Jigsaw Interactive, PSICAT, Tibco Business Studio, eclipse-cs Checkstyle, QNX Momentics, JPMorgan Chase, Wind River Workbench, EclEmma, Cyrano, XMIND, MyTourbook, Instantiations WindowBuilder Pro, Acceleo, ProSys mBedded Server, ModuleFusion, CHord Scate Generator and Apache Directory Studio.

Answer:  They are all past winners of an Eclipse Community Award.  Since 2006 we have recognized some of the leading individuals and products that make Eclipse a great community.

At EclipseCon 2010, we will once again announce the winners of the Eclipse Community Awards.   Nominations for both the Individual Awards, Project Awards and Technology Awards close end of day Friday, January 29.  We already have great  individuals, projects and products nominated but please take the time now to recognize who you feel has made a difference this pass year.

Time for a More Modern Eclipse Logo?

One aspect of the marketing discipline I don’t like is when marketeers spend considerable amount of time and money investing in logo designs, names, colors and tag lines.   I used to work for a company where the VP Marketing claimed the new logo and look was going dramatically propel the company to greatness.    Hundreds of thousands of dollars later the company still had mediocre products.   There are many examples of unsuccessful corporate re-brandings/re-naming of previously successful software companies; remember Inprise?  This is one area of marketing where I tend to place less importance and effort.

Given that personal bias, I come to the Eclipse logo.  If I am not mistaken the Eclipse logo has been around for 8-9 years without a lot of change.  It has done our community very well.  It is well recognized in our industry and I like it.  That being said design practices have changed and it might be time to look at ‘modernizing the logo’.

The e4 development team, specifically Susan McCourt,  got me thinking the time is right.  The e4 development team has been looking at updating some of the Eclipse UI elements but they started to realize this might start to impact the Eclipse logo.   Therefore, I agreed to look at updating the logo.

So what does this mean?

I don’t believe we are creating a new logo; we are updating/modernizing it.  The results of any update must be readily apparent that this is the logo for the Eclipse community.    We aren’t going to invest in a multi-million ad campaign to promote the new logo.  If we choose your contribution, appropriate Eclipse swag will come your way;  maybe even with the new logo. 

If we are going to make the change for e4 and Helios, then we need to get it done by EclipseCon.  Therefore, I want to set a date of March 15 to conclude on a new look or decide we remain with the existing look.

For a point of reference the artwork for the current logo and the different versions is available at eclipse.org/artwork/.

As a reminder, we are not designing an e4 logo, so please don’t incorporate e4 into a new look.

Submit your suggestions, ideas and comments on this bug.

Start your artistic engines and get designing.  Your creation could be with us for the next 8-9 years.

Three Key EclipseRT and OSGi Announcements

This has been a really good week for the EclipseRT runtime strategy. There were three announcements that indicate we are making good progress for establishing Eclipse as a community for creating innovative runtime technology based on OSGi.

1. Project Virgo was announced and proposed this week by SpringSource. As Mike and Adrian have described, this an important step towards making it easier for enterprise developers to adopt OSGi and EclipseRT technology.  Project Virgo plus Project Gemini (proposed by Oracle and SpringSource) bring to Eclipse all of the key reference implementations for the OSGi Enterprise specifications. If you consider the fact that Jetty is already an EclipseRT project, then the runtime story is looking really good.

2. Yesterday, Heiko Seeberger from WeigleWilczek proposed to bring the existing ScalaModules project to Eclipse. I believe the future of OSGi needs to include support for other languages.   Right now, OSGi is too tightly tied to Java. I see this support for Scala and the e4 work on JavaScript bundles as an important part of the future for EclipseRT and OSGi.  I would love to see support for other languages at Eclipse? Ideas and contributors are welcome.

3. Jeff McAffer announced his Equinox and OSGi book has been sent to the printers. I realize there are other OSGi books that have been published. However, my feeling is we need more.  We need to make it easier for developers to understand and adopt OSGi, books are a key tool to make this happen. Congrats to Jeff, Simon and Paul for adding to their book to the mix.

Three key announcements that point to nice momentum for EclipseRT.  I also think there are more good things coming.    EclipseCon will be an exciting time for EclipseRT and OSGi.

Eclipse Case Studies: More Help for the EclipseCon Program Committee

The EclipseCon Program Committee will be hard at work over the holidays.   They have until January 9 to review 430+ submissions and select about 150 talks for the final program.  Given the success of my recommendations for the Early Submissions, I thought why not give them a helping hand.

My vote goes to having lots of case studies at EclipseCon.  I enjoy hearing how people use Eclipse for building cool applications.  Therefore, here are the case studies I found in the EclipseCon submission system:

Creating Dynamic Enterprise Applications with Eclipse RCP – Cerner Healthcare is using RCP to build their next generation healthcare software. What is one of the hottest IT topics in the US:  Healthcare and a major player is using Eclipse RCP.

Case Study: SRM 2.0 – A next generation shared resource management system built on OSGi and Spring DM – St Jude Hospital has create a lab management system using OSGi and Spring DM. Looks like they migrated from JavaEE to the new OSGi architecture. I need to see this presentation!!

Modeling the World – If you want to move an oil rig, then model it first – Modeling the movement of oil rigs at Marintek

My Unmanned System is Eclipse Powered – unmanned surveillance systems for things like border security.

OneBench Reloaded – Pushing the (OSGI) Modularity Story in an Enterprise-wide Rich Client Stack – JPMorgan is a long time user of Eclipse RCP.  OneBench is a great case study on the power of RCP and I’d love to hear the update.

Use Xtext to Automate PBX Stress Testing – An interesting use of XText; DSLs and XText have a huge amount of interest.

Eclipse Modeling at Deutsche Boerse AG – More XText goodness, this time at the German Stock Exchange.

Practitioner Report: Migrating a large modeling environment from UML/XML to GMF/Xtext – Okay, another XText case study. A German billing center for pharmacies migrations to GMF/Xtext.

SDOL an Exclipse-Based DSL – State of Montana using Eclipse to create a DSL. Did I mention DSL and Eclipse is hot?

Eclipse meets Systems Biology – Using Eclipse RCP technology to predict the effects of drugs and mutations.

Eclipse to the Rescue – This case study was one of the early bird selection, so we get to see some pretty cool RAP and RCP applications for doing emergency planning simulation.

CRM for Mobile Customers With Eclipse – Besides being a cool RCP app in a cool space, they are using EMF, BIRT, p2, and maybe b3. Looks interesting.

Elexis – Private Practice With Eclipse – RCP application for patient records.

My apologies if I have missed some case studies.  Please feel free to add them as a comment.

EclipseCon PC no need to thank me.  You have a tough job, since I know there are lots of other really interesting submissions but please make sure I get to see some of these case studies.

Building a Marketplace Client

The next step for Eclipse Marketplace (MP) is bringing MP direct to the Eclipse user desktop.  We want to build a MP client that will be distributed in all of the Helios EPP packages.   Instead of navigating to a separate web site, the Eclipse user will have an integrated user experience to discover Eclipse solutions.

We have already started a discussion about the MP client requirements.   Please feel free to add your thoughts to the discussion.

We want to have the MP client built in time for Helios.  To make this happen, the Eclipse Foundation has a budget to fund the development work.  Therefore, we are now asking interested parties to submit proposals for creating the MP client.

Some details about what we would like to see in the proposals:

1. The requirements for the MP client will be documented in this bug.  The final list of requirements will be determined with the developer/organization building the MP client and the Eclipse Foundation.  Each proposal should describe the approach the developer/organization will take to fulfilling these requirements.

2. The intention is for the MP client to become a component of the EPP project.  All the code developed will be open sourced and the developers building the code will be expected to follow the Eclipse development guidelines.

3. Each proposal should describe the experiences the developer/organization has with building Eclipse solutions that would be relevant to a MP client.

4.  The MP client needs to be finished in time for Helios.  Therefore, a feature complete beta needs to be available by March 19 (Helios M6).

5. The developer/organization will be expected to support the MP client through Helios SR1, SR2 and the 2011 release train.  Support will include bug fixes, testing and release engineering for the new releases.

6. Each proposal should include the cost for the work.

7.  Proposals need to be submitted by January 15, 17:00ET.  Send your proposal to me at (ian dot skerrett at eclipse dot org).   We will make our selection by January 29.

Feel free to contact me or leave a comment if you have any questions.  We are on a very agressive timeline but I am very excited about this next step for Marketplace.

My Picks for the EclipseCon Early Bird Sessions

Last night was the deadline to have your EclipseCon session proposal considered by the Program Committee (PC) for one of the 5 early bird selections.  The good news is the PC now has 131 sessions to consider, the bad news is they have to make the selection by December 14th.  Luckily, I am not on the PC but I thought it would be fun to give them my recommendations for the talks:

1. Xtext meets e4: Developing an editor for the e4 workbench model – There is a lot of interest in e4 and Xtext, showing how you can use XText with e4 is an example of the future of Eclipse.
2. Modular Architecture from Top to Bottom – OSGi, Equinox, EclipseRT are hot topics but education on how to create proper architecture is key.  Both speakers know their stuff on this topic.
3. Groovy for Java Developers – Groovy is one of the cool new languages for developers.
4. Eclipse to the Rescue – I have seen Austin speak before.  He presents a very compelling case study of using RAP, RCP and Equinox.
5. Eclipse Modeling at Deutsche Boerse AG – We need more case studies at EclipseCon and this is another good story of using Eclipse modeling technology to solve real world problems.
6. Use XText to Automate PBX Stress Testing – Gustavo is a super smart guy and is doing some real world stuff.  This looks like a really compelling case study.
7. It’s a Dynamic World – Bringing Animations to SWT – e4 and SWT need to have animation support to be compelling for modern UIs.  This looks like an interesting solution.

Some comments about my selections:

• If I didn’t select your talk please don’t be offended.  Remember I am not on the PC and frankly my opinion might just be the kiss of death for the talks I mentioned.
• For the alert reader, I did indeed select 7 talks instead of the 5 the PC need to select by Dec. 14.  Once again proving that I am happy to not be on the PC and making very tough decisions.
• I could have easily selected another 7 talks.  Once again I am confident EclipseCon is going to have another great program.

The real deadline for submissions is December 18, so now is the time to get your proposal written and submitted.  Also, don’t forget that the early registration deadline for EclipseCon is December 31.

A Successful Open Source Fundraising Campaign?

Chris Aniszczyk has written how we have been doing more to solicit financial donations from the community.   In particular, we’ve added the Donate Now buttons to our download pages; which happen to be our high traffic pages.  Chris raises a good question on how far we should go with our ‘pan handling’ and I encourage everyone to provide feedback.

However, I am also interested in what is considered to be a successful open source fundraising campaign?  How much money should we be able to raise; from how many people?  Wikipedia’s multi-million annual campaign is at the extreme end.  I also noticed the GNOME community raised $25,000 this past year, up from $6400 the previous year.  Therefore, I thought it might be useful to share our results  since mid-July.

• Over a period of July 17 – Nov. 30 we have raised US$9916 from 601 individuals.
• We typically get on average 3 donations per day and the average donation is $21-$24.
• The donations are pre-predominately from Europeans and North Americans

What are we doing to accomplish these results?

• We have a Friends of Eclipse program that people can join for $35.  ‘Friends’ get direct access to the Foundation download servers which in practice gives them 24hr jump on a new release.  The Friends program is an annual commitment, so we actively ask for renewals.
• In July, we added the Donate Now buttons to the download pages.   As Chris describes they are also being added in other places on the site.  The first iteration of the Donate Now buttons were $2, $10, $20.  After 4 weeks, we changed the $2 to $5.  After the change, the average donation went from $8 to the current $21-$24,  number of donors dropped considerably but the overall revenue raised only increase slightly
• The closest thing we have done to a ‘marketing campaign’ for donations was before the Galileo release encouraging people to become Friends to get early access.   Overall though we are pretty modest on promoting the fundraising; so far no banner ads or pop-ups. 

Some questions I have:

• We quote in US$.  Does it make a difference to allow the donor to quote in their local currency?
• Wikipedia seems to do an annual campaign.  Are campaigns that last for 1-2 months the key for getting more donors or do you have a constant appeal for donors.
• How important are the benefits of the ‘Friends’ program.  For instance, if we added a t-shirt but raised the price to $50 would we net more money?  What other benefits have organizations offered.
• Are there ‘magic’ words to use in the appeal that will attract more donors?

There you have it?  I am interested in knowing what other groups have experienced or done.  What are the best practices for open source fundraising.  I certainly don’t claim we are a great model but I am hoping that by sharing our experiences we can get better.

Oh btw, Eclipse is a great community, lots of dedicated, hard working individuals, producing awesome, fantastic open source software.  I’d like to thank everyone that has already donated to make Eclipse an even better place.  It would be great to have even more people donating money back to the community.  Please DONATE NOW.