Greek Schools to Mars: RCP Applications

Last month, I started collecting screen shots of applications that have been built on Eclipse RCP. It is great to see the diversity of open source and commercial applications.

When we launch 3.1 we are planning to put a major emphasis on the success of Eclipse RCP. Showing that people are building real rich client applications is an important part of this message. I know there are many more examples out there, so feel free to send me your screen shots.

[Update: I changed this post to update the url pointing to the new screen shots. ]

Briefing industry analysts

We are planning to brief some industry analysts on the Eclipse 3.1 launch. We do this to make sure they understand the new news about Eclipse, so they can communicate it to their customers. Their customers tend to be decision makers in the large companies and ISVs. The hope is that they will help educate these decision makers on open source and Eclipse. Thus making it easier for developers to introduce Eclipse into large companies.

The current plan is to brief Mark Driver, Thomas Murphy, Mike Blechar from Gartner, Carl Zetie, John Rymer and Mike Gilpin from Forrester and Steve O’Grady, James Governor from Redmonk. If there are other analysts that you think we need to brief please let me know.

Eclipse Screencasts

As part of the June launch, I would like to make available a series of screencasts featuring the new Eclipse features. The idea is to provide 2-4 minute demos of different Eclipse features. I’ve suggested to each of the projects that this might be a useful way to communicate their new features. However, I also think it would be interesting for some users to provide screencasts of their favorite feature. If we get a lot, we might have to have a edit and review process before we post them on eclipse.org.

Camtasia and vnc2sfw, an open soource tool, seem to be the popular tools for creating screencasts. Let me know if you’re interested in helping out or better yet show me some of you favorite features.

Key messages for June press releases

I am starting to write the press releases and analyst briefing materials for our June launch. We have decided to focus on two press releases:

1. The fact that Eclipse is more than just a Java IDE and will be shipping 9 projects in the June/July timeframe
2. Eclipse RCP is here now and people are building rich client applications with it.

In the first press release ‘Eclipse is shipping more than just a Java IDE’ I would like to highlight some of the key features for each project. Ideally, these should be the top 3-5 cool things about the release. Below is what I have so far. It would be great to get comments and improvements from the community. I still need to get content for EMF, GEF, UML2 and AspectJ.

Eclipse Platform 3.1
- Support for JDK 1.5
- Significant performance improvements
- Better tools for building RCP applications
- Tighter integration with ANT and an ANT debugger.

Web Tools Project 1.0
- J2EE tools supported by the leading J2EE server vendors BEA, IBM, JBoss, ObjectWeb and others
- Creation and validation tools for web services

Test and Performance Platform Project 4.0
- Significant improvement in support for JUnit
- Integration with requirement and defect tracking management tools
- Usability improvements to tools, documentation and tutorials

Visual Editor 1.1
- Support for building RCP applications.

e-Week Articles on Sun and Eclipse

Daryl Taft from e-Week has just published an article ‘Eclipse Casts Shadow on Sun‘. Although the title is a bit sensational, it is a good review of the Eclipse vs NetBeans discussion. He has also written a follow-up article on Lee Nackman’s explanation of the Eclipse name that he presented at EclipseCon.

Daryl is one of the hardest working journalist that covers Eclipse. He talks to tons of people and generally has good insight into the trends and mood of the app dev community.

IBM Blogging and Breathing Guidelines

This week IBM announced a new set ofblogging guidelines that encouraged IBM employees to create public blogs. I also came across this great parody of these guidelines, called Breathing@IBM. It is a good laugh.

Marketing to Bloggers

When we do our launch in June, I want to make sure we get the message out via different blogs and developer forums. I’ve been contemplating what is the best method to convince people to write about Eclipse in their blogs. Microsoft has taken an interesting approach of actually recruiting 20 ‘influential bloggers’ to talk about Longhorn. I’ve been wondering if this approach would work for Eclipse?

However, this past weekend I am pretty convinced that we already have a great network of bloggers. When M7 was released, I counted 4 blog posting announcing the release on Planet Eclipse. There was also a thread started on The ServerSide , a number of blogs on JRoller mentioned M7 (1. 2,) and a thread on JavaLobby (why is it that JavaLobby discussion lead to a SWT vs Swing debate?). To top it off, we have had 22,914 downloads of M7 as of Tuesday morning. Not bad since it was just released on the weekend.

It doesn’t seem that we couldn’t do any better with the blogs or the developer forums? Do people agree? The one area I would like to get more exposure, is on some of the other projects. In June and July, BIRT, TPTP, Web Tools, AspectJ, EMF, GEF and VE are all releasing new versions. It would be nice to get some exposure for these projects.

Eclipse Tops in SD Times 100

SD Times just released their annual SD Times 100 annual survey of the most influential companies and organziations in the industry. The Eclipse Foundation come out on top in the Tools and Environments category and listed as one of the key influencers. More importantly a good portion of the 72 companies mentioned, at least 26 by my count, are members of the Eclipse Foundation.

Two other points: 1) ‘The Bazaar’ was recongized as being the top influencer, and 2) Microsoft .NET took the top position in the Deployment Platform category. I think they missed out not including Eclipse RCP in this category. Eclipse RCP is here now and ready to be used.

Ed Burnette’s Great Adventure

I recently asked Ed Burnette to help write an article about Eclipse 3.1 for an upcoming edition of JDJ. Ed, being a great supportter, said ’sure and I’m going to get input from the community on my blog. ‘ Kind of a cool way to write an article and something I have never seen done before. I’ve even helped write a draft introduction. So if you want to write-up your favorite 3.1 feature or make sure I haven’t put too much market-speak in the introduction, go take a look.

Eclipse at JavaOne

Eclipse is going to have a booth at JavaOne. I expect Sun to be pushing hard on NetBeans, so I want to make sure Eclipse has a strong showing. Right now we are planning to feature the new releases of each project. If anyone is going to JavaOne and wants to help ’staff’ the booth, let me know. We will probably have 2 hours shifts, so if you want to show off Eclipse to other Java developers this is the place to be.

We also want to highlight all the Eclipse member companies exhibiting at JavaOne. A group of companies are thinking of doing a ‘passport’ game where the attendee goes to each company, gets a stamp and then wins a prize. T-shirts are the standard prizes but they are getting pretty boring. Any suggestion on what would be a cool giveaway?