The Pillars of Eclipse

Last week at EclipseCon we presented the ‘Pillars of Eclipse’ at the members meeting and to the press. The goal was to provide a high level categorization and explanation of the different areas that the Eclipse community is currently engaged. I also wrote a Guest Column in SD Times that provides a more detailed explanation.

This was based on the initial posting I did here. The feedback was generally positive and seem to help people better understand Eclipse. I expect the Pillars to change and evolve over time, so please feel free to send me your feedback.

Two blog posts on Eclipse and Microsoft

I recently came across two blog postings about Eclipse and Microsoft. The first talking about Eclipse3.1 running on the IKVM.

The second being a bit more contraversial, by Keith Harrison-Broninski titled ‘Eclipse and the end of the Microsoft monopoly‘. Of course it is always nice to see people recognize the importance of Eclipse RCP and Eclipse projects like ECF and Higgins. This is also the second time, in the last couple of weeks, someone has mentioned to me that an Eclipse plug-in to support ODF would be very cool. Is there anyone working on an ODF plug-in?

Looks like Keith and his company is also using RCP for their new project. Looks pretty interesting…

btw, James Governor take a look at where their are located. Seems like there is some innovation going on in the UK.

EclipseCon Demographics

In case you were wondering who is attending EclipseCon, I pulled some numbers from the information we collected at registration time.

Pretty obvious this is a serious technical conference; 75% of the attendees being developers, architects and development managers.

JDT is the project used by most attendees but RCP and the other projects are well represented.
The attendees mainly came from ISVs and Enterprises.

Finally, over 75% of the attendees have been using Eclipse for more than 1 year.

Thank you to our judges?

A number of people have asked me how the winners of the Eclipse Community Awards were selected. The Individual awards were voted on by the community. The Technology awards were selected by a panel of judges. The judges used three criteria for selected the winners were:

1. Usability and intuitiveness of the user interface - Is the product user interface easy to understand
2. Innovation and Uniqueness - How cleverly does it solve the problem
3. Completeness - How well does it solve the problem, including technology, documentation, tutorials, web site, community support, etc.

A special thank you to the judges for spending the time review over 50 nominations, it was greatly appreciated.

Eclipse Community Award Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the Eclipse Awards. The winners were announced during a reception this evening at EclipseCon. I hope someone else will post some pictures of the event.

The winners are:

Top Ambassador: Ed Burnette
Top Contributor: Linda Watson
Top Committer: Alain Magloire
Best Open Source RCP Application: Gumtree
Best Open Source Eclipse-based Developer Tool: RadRails
Best Commercial Eclipse-based Developer Tool: BEA Workshop Studio
Best Commercial Eclipse RCP Application: Lombardi Software TeamWorks
Best Deployment in an Enterprise: Compass Group (Pty) Ltd & Jigsaw Interactive CC

Special thank you to Tony Lam (Gumtree) and Andre Oosthuizen (Jigsaw) who traveled from Australia and South Africa respectively to receive their awards.

News from EclipseCon

The news from EclipseCon is starting to come out here and here. We are planning to issue the Foundation press releases Tuesday morning, focusing on RCP, ALM and the PHP IDE. I also expect to see 15-20 press releases from companies announcing Eclipse related news; so expect to see lots of interesting coverage.

btw, thanks to everyone that came to the blogging party. Great to meet everyone in person!

Blogging party at the Hyatt

Looks like some people are interested in meeting up for an informal blogging party. Chris, Al, Gunnar, Wayne, Martin, Andre are all in. Maybe Ed, and Kim will arrive real late . Anyone else is welcome to join us.

I suggest we meet in the Hyatt lobby lounge, Sunday, 6:00pm; hopefully an easy place to find.

See you there.

EclipseCon Sell-out?

Bjorn surprise me today when he announced that EclipseCon was heading towards a sell-out. I’ve always thought the big Santa Clara Convention Center, no problem…. Well it turns out we only have enough seats to feed between 1400-1500 people.

The side effect is that if you were planning on registering on-site at the conference, you are going to be out of luck. If you are going, register now.

Evans Study of IDEs

Evan’s Data has release another IDE market survey from November 2005. This survey is free to download, so everyone can take a look.

An interesting thing about this survey is that it includes more than just Java IDEs. Microsoft Visual Studio comes out on top, in terms of share, but Eclipse is second, followed by Macromedia Studio MX. There is a quote from the study that claims Eclipse is the fastest growing IDE; although I am not sure how that was measured.

The report also ranks the IDEs by different features and then provides an overall relative ranking. IBM Rational Developer is top, followed by Borland JBuilder and then Sun Java Studio. Eclipse was seventh in the relative ranking.

It is worthwhile taking a look at the report.

Eclipse gains market share in 2005

Each year BZ Research (publishers of SD Times and Eclipse Review) do a ‘Java Use and Awareness‘ survey of the SD Times readers. One of the question is ‘What java development environment do you use?’ They have been doing this since 2002, so you can see some interesting trends.

Not sure how I missed their most recent survey but it is from December 2005. They have given me permission to blog the results of the Java IDE question. (btw, it is also referenced in the Feb. 1, page 12, edition of SD Times.) The good news is Eclipse grew 9% in 2005 and now stands at 65.1%. If you add in the IDE’s that are based on Eclipse, the number gets even better. Interesting, one IDE that is claiming great momentum seems to have no growth.

Measuring the success of Eclipse or any open source project is always a challenge. Therefore, market research like this always raises my interest. I also like the BZ Research survey for a couple of reasons:

1. I guess the obvious reason being Eclipse is on top
2. The sample size is large, in this case 621, and the sample is derived from the readership of SD Times; which I believe provides a good sample of the IT industry. Do people agree with this assertion?
3. It provides trend data going back to 2002, so you can see what changes are occurring.

btw, sorry for the poor graphic quality.