Eclipse Community Awards Finalists

Bjorn has already announced the finalist for the Individual Awards. I had the pleasure of working with a panel of judges to determine the finalist for the Technology Awards. The winners will be announced Monday, March 21 at an EclipseCon reception. Congratulations to all of the finalists and a special thank you to everyone that submitted a nomination.

We have decided to only announce a winner in the ‘Best Deployment’ and ‘Best Open Source Developer Tool’ category, since we didn’t receive many nominations in these categories. However in the other three categories the finalist are:

Best Open Source RCP Application
Gumtree
uDig

Best Commercial Eclipse-based Developer Tool
BEA Workshop Studio
Exadel Studio Pro
QNX Momentics

Best Commercial Eclipse RCP Application
Lombardi Teamworks
Future Management Logic MindGuide

EclipseCon: A Global Conference

The great thing about the Eclipse community is that it is truly a global community. Taking a look at the countries that will be represented at EclipseCon, you start to get that feeling. In total, close to 45 different countries will be reprsented. Of course a large percentage are coming from the US but it is nice to see that people are coming from as far as South Africa and Australia.

btw, still not too late to register.

Countries Represented at EclipseCon

Australia	Iceland	Scotland
Austria	India	Slovakia
Belgium	Indonesia	Slovenia
Brazil	Iran	South Africa
Canada	Ireland	Spain
China	Israel	Sweden
Colombia	Italy	Switzerland
Czech Republic	Jamaica	Turkey
Denmark	Japan	United Kingdom
Egypt	Korea, South	United States
Estonia	Mexico	Vietnam
Finland	Nepal
France	Netherlands
Germany	Nicaragua
Greece	Norway
Honduras	Poland
Hong Kong	Russia

Blogging Party at EclipseCon

I’d like to organize a blogging party at EclipseCon. I think it would be cool to meet in person all the different Eclipse bloggers. We could even talk about who is going to blog at EclipseCon and what sessions are going to get covered.

If you are up for it, I would suggest we get together Sunday, March 19 t from 6-8pm. I will buy the drinks and munchies but to help with the planning, can you please leave a comment or send me an e-mail (ian at eclipse dot org) if you want to attend.

RCP Short and Sweet - Part 2

I am starting to write a press release to announce some project initiatives around RCP. I want to include a short, crisp description of what is RCP. The cool thing about the Eclipse community is that Kim has already started to create a version. I took some of Kim’s ideas and the ideas in her comments to come up with the following. Let me know what you think?

Eclipse RCP is an integration platform for building and deploying rich, full featured applications. The main features of RCP include:

- A dynamic runtime component model, based on the OSGi specification, that allow for easy integration and extension of components from different vendors.

- The ability to deploy and update client applications from a central server.

- A number of frameworks for common application tasks, such as help systems, generic workbench, wizards, etc.

- A GUI widget library that allows for applications to natively run on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux and MacOS.

- The ability to work offline and take advantage of the local operating system resources, such as local file system, printing, etc.