New Eclipse Conference: Eclipse Forum Europe

A new Eclipse conference, Eclipse Forum Europe, has just been announced for May 8-10 in Wiesbaden, Germany. There is a call for papers; deadline is January 20. They are also looking for exhibitors and sponsors.

Germany has long been a hotbed for Eclipse, so this should be a great conference.

Eclipse Seminar Series: Coming to a City Near You

We are going to launch an Eclipse seminar series in February and early March, visiting San Diego, Dallas, Raleigh/Durham and Atlanta. The purpose of the seminars is two fold: 1) educate technical decision makers in IT departments on the benefit of using Eclipse as a platform for enterprise development and deployment. 2) host some code clinics for developers that are building plug-ins and rcp applications and want the opportunity to work through some of their questions about Eclipse.

In each city we will have a morning seminar and an afternoon seminar. The morning seminar will feature Carl Zetie from Forrester Research talking about his research into enterprise adoption of Eclipse. Cliff Schmidt the VP of Legal Affairs at Apache Software Foundation will do a presentation explaining open source licensing and we will have a number of case studies from different member companies. Our hope is that it will be the type of information that educates IT development management on the reasons to adopt Eclipse in their departments. So, if you know of anyone that might be interested, please send them to the registration site.

In the afternoon, Wayne Beaton and a number of committers will lead the code clinics. The idea is to have a relatively informal work session where developers can bring their laptops, code and questions. Wayne and the committers will be on-hand to work with the attendees on their application. It should be a great opportunity for people developing Eclipse applications to interact with some of the committers and other people developing Eclipse applications.

We are going to officially launch the seminar series in January. If it wasn’t for the holidays we would probably do it next week. However, I have turned on the registration system, so if you want to check out the details or even register go right ahead.

Merry Christmas
Ian

btw, if you have any comments on the registration pages please let me know.

Web Tools Platform 1.0 Release

The Web Tools Platform team is getting ready for their 1.0 release. We are issuing a press release on Monday about the release.

Tim Wagner is the PMC leader of the WTP project. I had the chance to chat with Tim last week at the Eclipse council meetings. He agreed to answer some of my questions about the WTP release.

Some people will say WTP 1.0 is late and of low quality. Do you think it is fair?

Tim: The WTP project was rebooted just over a year ago and BEA joined to lead the project in March. Given the depth and breadth of features involved, in WTP delivering a 1.0 release in December of 2005 was still a huge challenge. The 0.7 release was very helpful in driving us toward stability, but to have attempted to declare APIs at that time would have been a mistake, given the intervening changes to the project model. Do we still have challenges? Certainly – stability, scalability, meeting the needs of adopters – this is still a 1.0 release, and we’ll be working on all of those areas for the 1.0.1 service pack in February and again in 1.5 as part of the “Callisto” release train. Feedback, and help, are always appreciated.

The PMC for WTP seems pretty large with representatives from competing J2EE suppliers? How do things get done?

Tim: Wouldn’t it be fun to watch a PMC meeting that was a knock-down battle of corporate self-interest? The boring truth, however, is that they’re generally cooperative and decisions are often unanimous. The WTP PMC is large by Eclipse standards, but it functions well – we have enough people to work on different tasks simultaneously (build issues, requirements gathering, IP checks) which is helpful with a project of this size and complexity. We also appreciate that the different PMC members bring a useful diversity of opinions – large and small companies, ISVs and integrators, commercial and open source concerns – to the table, which in my mind translates to a better representation of our users and adopters. One issue that *could* have been controversial – which new technologies to include in WTP – is conveniently addressed for us by our project charter, which stipulates that WTP must focus on standards-based languages and runtimes; technologies outside our charter can be addressed in technology projects. Finally, the PMC members are united by their interest in making Eclipse, and WTP in particular, succeed – and that means we sometimes have to check our respective corporate affiliations at the door for the good of the community.

What is next for WTP?

Tim: In the short term we’ll have a service pack (1.0.1) in February, a couple of weeks after the platform ships 3.1.2, to address any critical issues with the 1.0 release. After that is Callisto – the release train in late June with the platform and a number of other projects, including WTP, shipping for the first time in a coordinated fashion. WTP’s focus for Callisto will be on working well when integrated with all the plugins from the other projects and adopting the 3.2 platform API changes. Time permitting, we’ll work on additional project refactoring support, prepare for Java EE 5 and annotation-based tooling, continue to improve performance and stability, and update the version of various web standards that we support. The more help we get, the more we can tackle, so extra hands mean more features!

RIA tools at Eclipse

The really cool thing about Eclipse is that it is a platform for many things. Take RIA tools, it seems a lot of the RIA solutions are basing their tools on Eclipse. For instance, Nexaweb just joined the Eclipse Foundation and based their Nexaweb Studio on Eclipse. Macromedia has already announced their Eclipse based Flex environment. There is even an Eclipse technology project, IDE for Laszlo, at Eclipse.

In the new year, I hope to spend some time better understanding the different RIA solutions. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about Eclipse RCP but I want to better understand how RIA and RCP can interoperate.

ApacheCon

I am spending Monday in San Diego at ApacheCon for their business track. The morning keynote titled Open Source is not a crime — yet! was by Cory Doctorow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is an incredibly dynamic speaker but paints a very dim view of the future of software and open source due to all the legislation that is being passed around copyright and digital rights management.

Simon Phipps from Sun did one of the best open source presentations I have seen. I agreed with most of Simon’s views and ideas around open source. He referred to the Open Source DNA Triangle: License, Governance and Motivation Model (ie. what is motivating the people working on the project). He has uploaded his slides but unfortunately, they might not be as descriptive as seeing Simon speak.

Gartner Open Source Conference

I had the opportunity to attend the Gartner Open Source Summit this week in Orlando. Overall, I am glad I went and I think Gartner deserves congratulations for putting on a fine event. Zach Urlocker from MySQL has also blogged about the conference. Gartner has been criticized for being slow, even negative, on open source. The good news is that this seems to be changing.

Gartner speaks the language of large mainstream IT departments. There audience is not the bleeding edge or even leading adopters. It is the larege corporate mainstream IT shops. For instance, I spoke with two people that were just ‘thinking’ of adopting Linux and Apache as their web server. I thought the entire world uses Linux and Apache as their web server? These were individuals from well-known multi-billion companies that are very conservative. Gartner’s strength is educating these people.

A central theme of the conference was open source is quickly becoming mainstream and you need to get ready. The Gartner analyst, especially Mark Driver, did an excellent job explaining the dynamics of the open source community and how it will impact the software market and the enterprise. He stressed that the key issues for adoption of open source in enterprise are support and licensing. His view is that we have moved beyond the discussion of technology maturity.

Eclipse was well represented at the conference. Mark Driver positioned the Development Tools segment as the most mature category of open source software; operating systems and security were the next in maturity level. The most immature were ESB, Enterprise Apps, and process management. An informal show of hands during a session showed 80-90% of attendees developing in Java were using Eclipse.

Dan Woods did an excellent presentation to wrap up the conference. His main points were 1) developing skills within the enterprise are critical if you want to benefit from open source. 2) open source companies (JBoss, MySQL) are becoming more like enterprise software companies. This not necessarily being a bad thing.

A knock on the conference might be that Gartner was too bullish on open source. In some presentations you got the impression that all software was going to be open source and the existing vendors were in big trouble. I just don’t buy this. There is lots of room for commercial software. In fairness, I think Gartner was trying to reinforce with their audience that open source is changing things and you need to change with it.

There was one particularly weak presentation that tried to describe how open source communities work. I didn’t get the feeling that the analyst was providing a balanced view of the different open source communities. SourceForge seemed to be his point of reference.

Regardless, I think congratulations are in order for Mark Driver and Gartner for putting on the conference. If they continue with the level of content and analysis that was presented at this conference, it will only benefit the open source communities.

When to use Eclipse RCP?

As we start talking more and more about Eclipse RCP, I find it important to be able to describe when someone should consider using Eclipse RCP, instead of alternative technologies. If anything it starts to help people better understand the capabilities of Eclipse RCP.

In the space of platforms for rich user applications there seems to be a number of potential solutions, including Eclipse RCP, AJAX, MS .Net and Flash. (I am sure I am missing other potential solutions, feel free to add a comment.) At the high level, I think there are a couple of decision points that lead you to a different technology alternative.

Point #1 - Organization Culture

Is your organization considered a Microsoft or Java shop? Are most of the programmers trained on .Net or in Java or something else? Do you have a strategic direction to develop all applications on Java or .Net. Lets face it, an organization that is 100% Microsoft probably won’t/shouldn’t consider Eclipse RCP. If it is 100% Java, then I would hope Eclipse RCP would have a lot to offer. Lots of shops are heterogeneous, so the decision might be less than obvious.

Point #2 - Type of End User

What is the user profile of the application end user? Is it a casual user that uses the application occassionally or a power user that ‘lives’ in the application. For instance, I am fine doing my on-line banking via a browser, since I do it only once or twice a month. However, a bank employee that manages high-end banking customers probably wants to have a desktop application. They need to be able to save local information, switch between different contexts and tasks. Also integration with other applications on the desktop is often important. Here I think something like MS .Net or Eclipse RCP would be a big win.

Point #3 - Type of Application

I think there are different types of applications that are better suited for AJAX, Flash or RCP. At a very simplistic level I think there are three types of applications: 1) content delivery, ie portals, dashboards, where presentation is very important. 2) collaboration/workflow applications,where context and tasks switching is important and 3) transactional applications. For the content delivery, AJAX and Flash seem to be better suited for presentation and ease of content delivery. However, when you get into sophisticated workflow or collaboration, the ability to work offline and have persistent data is pretty important. Here I think RCP might be better suited. For transactional applications, I think it will depend, maybe on the type of user?

Of course none of this is black and white; there is a lot of gray in all of this. However, I am interested if people think this begins to hit home on when thinking about RCP? Or is this just pure marketing fluff and I’ve missed the important stuff?

Eclipse Community Awards

We have just announced the Eclipse Community Awards (yes I know we need a better name, more on that later). A lot of individuals and organizations spend countless hours contributing to the Eclipse community. This is your chance to nominate that individual or technology that you think is deserving of recognition.

We plan to announce the winners in March at EclipseCon. Nominations for the individal awards are open now. Voting for the individual awards will begin in February 10. Nominations for the technology awards can be sent to (awards at eclipse dot org). A panel of esteen judges will select the winner for the technology awards. I hope to get some cool prizes for the winners.

Now for the name. I’d like to come up with something a bit more snazzy than the Eclipse Community Awards. Let me know if you have any good suggestions. Kim the last time I asked for good ideas you came up with the Million Download Challenge, so I am counting on you.

Gartner Open Source Conference and ApacheCon

Over the next two weeks I will be traveling to the Gartner Open Source Conference and ApacheCon. I think it is really great to see Gartner hosting an open source conference. I am hopeful they will start helping educate the decision makers in IT departments on the merits and issues of open source software.

I am also very excited about attending ApacheCon. Unfortunately I will only be there on the Monday, during their business track. Looking forward to attending their sessions.

It would be great to meet up with anyone attending either of these conferences. Drop me an e-mail at (ian at eclipse dot org) or leave a comment.