Eclipse RCP RSS Reader

I must admit I am just getting into the world of Blogs, RSS and RSS Readers. I know, I am a bit slow. I’ve been using Bloglines as my RSS Reader and really struggle with the primitive browser interface. I just found an Eclipse RCP based reader called RSSOwl. This is cool stuff. Finally, I get to eat my own dog food. Is there an Eclipse RCP client for actually creating blog postings?

Show off your RCP application

I think Eclipse RCP is an exciting part of the Eclipse story. The ability to build rich client applications with a component model that allows for dynamic updates of new features and patches is pretty compelling. In fact, I think for ISVs and open software projects it makes an excellent platform for deploying software.

We have lots of examples of Eclipse RCP applications listed on eclipse.org but I know there are many more examples that have not been listed. If you are building an RCP application and want to be listed send an e-mail to news@eclipse.org. I would also like to get screen shots of RCP applications that I can use for presentations. Feel free to send them to me ian.skerrett at eclipse.org.

Eclipse Japan

The Eclipse Japan web site just went live on eclipse.org. We are very lucky to have strong support in Japan from some key companies: NTT Comware, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC and IBM. I think it is great to have these companies helping provide the Japanese content for eclipse.org.

Eclipse is doing really well in Japan. Mike Milinkovich forward me links to two market studies of IDE usage in Japan. The 2002 data show Eclipse at about 1% but in 2004 it goes up to 61%. Pretty cool.

Mike is in Japan this week doing a keynote at the UML Forum and kicking off the Eclipse Japan Working Group seminar.

Analyst View of Eclipse

Today I had the opportunity to listen to a webinar Eclipse Changes the Game for Application Development by Carl Zetie of Forrester Research. Unfortunately I think you need to be a client of Forrester to see the slides but I was lucky enough to be an invited guest.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet Carl a couple of times and he is one of the few industry analyst that really seems to get Eclipse. He has written extensively about Eclipse and understands the real value is the Eclipse plug-in infrastracture and how the strong ecosystem of Eclipse plug-ins allows the IT departments to gain control of their development tool selection. Carl has also written an article called How Developers Can Conquer Complexity which is particularly useful for describing how IT departnents can capitalize on the Eclipse plug-in infrastructure to choose the best of breed tools.

Interesting, Carl claims one of the biggest barriers to adoption of Eclipse in corporate IT departments is that the developers are afraid of admitting they are using Eclipse. His claim is that a lot of developer are using Eclipse, instead of the ’standard’ corporate tool.

Unfortunately, you have to be a client of Forrester to see most of Carl’s content. However, if you are in the position of trying to convice you manager about Eclipse, sometimes the perspective of an industry analyst can help. In that case, I’d recommend trying to get access to some of his content.

Brand Hijack

I have just finished reading a new book on branding called Brand Hijack: marketing without marketing, by Alex Wipperfurth. I’m often pretty skeptical about ‘marketing/branding’ books but this one was pretty good. They author was involved with the marketing at Napster but also uses Linux, Apple, and others as case studies. If you are interested in these types of topics I would recommend picking up a copy.

The central theme of the book is that a brand belongs to a community not a company or a bunch of marketers/brand managers. Instead of doing brand value propositions, spending lots of money on advertising or marketing campaigns, the brand manager should listen to the community and let them participate in the setting the tone/culture of the community. The community will ultimately determine the meaning of a brand.

One of the more interesting chapters was on the description of ‘brand tribes’. The book defines a brand tribe as:

A group of people who share their interest in a specific brand and create a parallel social universe ripe with its own values, rituals, vocabulary, and hierarchy.

It then goes on to compare brand tribes, like Linux and eBay with different cults. It includes a great quote from Linus Torvalds, ‘My name is Linus. And I am your God.’ I wonder if he really did say this?. The main point is that a brand tribe provides a powerful mechanism for sense of belonging and loyalty. If you want to market to these tribes you need to first understand their values, and second, stay out of their way. They don’t want to be controlled by marketing.

As I was reading the book, I could see a lot of parallel’s to the Eclipse community. I strongly believe the success of Eclipse has been because of the community, not particularly great marketing or a huge marketing budget. I’m not trying to knock IBM, in fact, I think they had the foresight to stay out of the way and listen. In my mind, the success of Eclipse has been mostly driven by the open source developer and the ISV community.

One complaint I have about the book is that it was mostly focused on creating new brands. It used very few examples of existing brands and how to ensure they remain successful. Sometime I was wondering if the case study about Napster was just good luck and good timing.

So what is the future of the Eclipse brand? The one thing I know is that we won’t be doing any advertising or marketing campaign to define the brand. Even if I wanted (which I don’t), we just don’t have the budget. The future success of the Eclipse brand is going to be driven by the community.

Eclipse Around the World

One of the really cool things about Eclipse is that there is lots of Eclipse events going on all around the world. These are events organized by people in the Eclipse community and in the native language.

• For instance, NTT Comware, Hitachi, Fujitsui, NEC and IBM Japan have started an Eclipse Japan Working Group. They are holding their first seminar April 25 in Tokyo. Go here if you are interested in registering.
• The iX Eclipse Conference is running their second edition in Heidelberg, Germany. More info can be found here.
• BSI and the Swiss PostFinance are organizing an Eclipse RCP workshop. They have a call for submissions here.
• And for you English speaking people, BZ Media is arranging an Eclipse World conference in New York City. More info can be found here.

A full listing of Eclipse related talks and events can be found on our community page. If we have missed any please send an e-mail to news@eclipse.org.

Maybe there is hope?

I just noticed that Tim Boudreau at Sun has taken down his recent blog that was very negative about Eclipse. Seems like he was having a bad day. As someone who on occassion has sent a couple of late night e-mails that I later regret, I can certainly relate. I applaud Tim for taking the high road. Wouldn’t it be nice if the other Sun employee, Charles Ditzel would just show the same amount of integrity.

Is Sun creating FUD?

Have you noticed that ever since EclipseCon, Sun has turned up the noise and FUD level with respect to Eclipse. I am disappointed that Sun is taking the low road but it seems they are a bit panicked about some of the success Eclipse is enjoying. I am a big believer in positive marketing. Talk about the good things of a product or community and people will listen. People just tend to turn-off the negative messages.

Unfortunately the latest blog posting by Tim Boudreau has some factual errors that just need to be corrected. Let me set the record straight on some of the more blatant items in his post.

1. First and foremost, it is absolutely false that anyone has to pay any money in order to contribute to Eclipse. If you want to come and make the best tool platform better, come and contribute to one of over forty Eclipse projects. Anybody can contribute to Eclipse. Here is just a small sampling of projects at Eclipse which are being contributed by people who have no connection to a paying Eclipse member: Parallel Tools Platform (Los Alamos National Labs), Eclipse Communication Framework (Scott Lewis), Eclipse Trust Framework (socialphysics.org) , Eclipse Community Education Project (Espirity) , Buckminster (ObjectWeb), Lepido (Anyware Technologies), Mylar (Univ. of British Columbia) and Photran (Univ. of Illionois). Ed Burnette has done a great blogging about these projects.

Companies pay membership fees to support the Eclipse Foundation so that we can provide a website and other services for our community. The fees also pay the salaries of the Foundation employees, including myself. This allows the Foundation to be completely independent. Unlike NetBeans, we are not controlled and paid for by a single for-profit company.

2. re: “…if you contribute to NetBeans, you share copyright - you still own what you write. Last I knew that was not the case with Eclipse.” This is completely wrong, and has never been the case. If you contribute to Eclipse, you retain 100% of the copyright ownership. You don’t even share ownership with Eclipse. It’s yours. The Eclipse Public License simply provides a vehicle by which you license your code so that it is freely available to the open source community.

3. Tim seems to likes to believe that there is a conspiracy that IBM is controlling Eclipse. He uses the rather lame example of IBM distributing software CDs at EclipseCon. As I have explained before on JavaLobby, anyone could have chosen to distribute CDs at EclipseCon. It is too bad that he continues to try to create FUD with this example. Does any actually believe that BEA, Borland, CA, SAP, Sybase would actually pay to join the Eclipse board if it was controlled by IBM.

There are a number of other factual problems with his blog but it is great to see that other people have already responded to his posting. I actually agree with Martin Perez that less ranting and more work is much more productive and with Stephen O’Grady that we should should be working to reconcile the divide in the Java tools community.

Eclipse Based Products - More than you may know

When I first started at Eclipse, I was truly surprised of the number of products that are based on Eclipse. Most people know about IBM’s commitment and use of Eclipse in their Websphere Studio products. However a lot of people, including myself, might no know that there are many more companies that have based their development tools on Eclipse. And the really surprising thing is that a LOT are not even Java based tools.

Here is just a sample of developer products that are based on JDT or CDT. The cool thing is that they span markets ranging from Enterprise IT, Linux and Embedded. Don’t forget there are hundreds more products that are plug-ins to Eclipse.

Enterprise IT

• Exadel Struts Studio and JSF Studio
• Genuitec MyEclipse
• JBoss Eclipse IDE
• IBM WebSphere Studio
• Kinzan Studio
• M7 NitroX
• Parasoft JTest
• PureEdge Designer
• SAP NetWeaver Studio

Embedded

• Mentor Graphics Nucleus Edge
• Monta Vista Dev Rocket
• PalmOS Dev Suite
• QNX Momentics
• Tensilica Xtensa Xplorer IDE
• TimeSys TimeStorm IDE
• Wind River Workbench

Linux

• Intel C++ Compiler 8.1 for Linux
• Novell/SuSE SDK
• Red Hat Developer Suite

Welcome to my new blog

Welcome to my new blog. I am the Director of Marketing for the Eclipse Foundation. I hope to use this blog to highlight some of the wonderful products, success and activities in the Eclipse ecosystem. I also hope to hear from people using Eclipse and get feedback on how the Eclipse Foundation can do a better job communicating to the community.

Stay tune.