Share Your Callisto Experiences

Now that Callisto is out, it is your turn to talk. Tell people what you like and dislike, what are the cool new things, what is the easiest way to get things installed, what projects are you using? Write a blog posting, post something to EclipseZone or leave a comment here.

To make it easier to share your experiences, we have also started a wiki page, which is also accessible from the main Callisto page. Add you link here and everyone will be able to see it. I’ve also started a del.icio.us tag called callisto-blogs, so you can also tag your posting or even tag other posting.

Finally, congratulations to all the projects! Back at EclipseCon, we announced at a press conference that Callisto was going to ship at the end of June. I must admit, I was a bit nervous about such a bold and public announcement but you guys did it! In all my years in the software industry, I have never seen a release of this size, or even smaller, hit their date with such accuracy. You guys rock!

btw, I am out of here on vacation until July 10th. Get to spend a week on the beach playing with my daughters.

Forrester Open Source Wave Report

Forrester has just released their first Open Source Wave Report. I think it is great that Forrester is doing this type of open source research. It will help educate the mainstream IT decision maker on the health and maturity of the open source communities. It also provides legitimacy for those who need to fight open source nay-sayers.

Unfortunately, you need to be a Forrester client to view the report or you can buy it for a whopping $1995.

btw, it is nice to see Eclipse rated so highly.

UPDATE: I stand corrected; this is actually the third time Forrester has done an Open Source Wave Report. They published one in Sept. 03 and April 04.

Lots of RCP and OSGi news

Beyond the hype/press around Callisto, it has been a good news week for RCP and Equinox.

First, we have made available two new RCP case studies: PlumCanary Chirp and Refractions uDig. In the world of mashups and Google Maps, it is really amazing to see the next level of sophistication, uDig, a rich client GIS platform can provide.

Eric Barroca also announced that their RCP based system is up an running at the AFP. Congratulations to Eric and team.

IBM announced that Sametime was re-being built on RCP. While this might not be new news, it is the first time I have seen IBM talk about allowing Eclipse developers to write plug-ins. It will be interesting to watch an ecosystem of plug-ins develop around Sametime.

Finally, the OSGi Alliance announced that Equinox is one of the first OSGi products to receive R4 certification. There seems to be a lot of interest in OSGi and it is great to see Equinox as a leading implementation. In fact, if I understand it correctly, Equinox is used as the reference implementation for OSGi.

All good news and just in time for my vacation….

Press Coverage of Callisto

As many people have noticed we issued the Callisto press release this Monday. We have nice received coverage in most major English-language tech-oriented publication. Instead of listing them here, check out my del.icio.us Callisto tagroll. [Note for some reason I can not convince Blogger to allow me to embedd javascript in this post. If anyone knows how to do it please let me know.] Also, if you see additional coverage, especially non-English coverage, please send me a tag via the del.icio.us network, use for:ianskerrett.

A number of people have mentioned they were surprised the press release went out Monday, June 26, instead of Friday, June 30, when Callisto will be available. Certainly in an ideal world we would have done the press release at the same time as the actual release. However, for some reason, unknown to me, the press typically publishes stories early in the week. Therefore, to ensure maximum coverage we issued the press release early in the week. Waiting until after the actual release would have been sub-optimal because 1) it would no longer be news and 2) the week of July 4 is usually pretty quiet for reporters.

btw, I really believe press coverage is just one small part of getting the word out about Callisto. Getting good technical content about the Callisto projects will really drive awareness. This is why we did the webinars, we are also doing a series of podcast with EclipseZone and I look forward to seeing Callisto oriented blog posting. In fact, I have started a Callisto-blogs tag, so if you see any Callisto blogs please send them to me via for:ianskerrett. I am also trying aggregate some posting on the Eclipse wiki, so please feel free to add your own posting.

Podcast: The Benefits of Eclipse to Large ISVs

In the second of our series of podcasts (the first being here), Dana Gardner talks with Bill Roth from BEA and Steve Heintz from Wind River about their experiences with Eclipse. The discussion revolves around the benefits BEA and Wind River have gained from using Eclipse and what the future may hold for Eclipse.

Listen to the podcast or if you prefer to read the transcript.

What programmers need to know about marketers

Doug Schaffer likes to claim marketing types are on a ‘different plane of the universe’. Seth Godin has finally provided a great explanation for developers trying to understand marketers.

My favorites include:

#3 - Most marketers have no clue whatsoever what to do. So we do unoriginal things, or stall, or make promises we can’t keep.

I think open source and developer to developer marketing has made things even more difficult for marketers.

#10 - Without marketing, all your great coding is worthless. Push your marketer to be brave and bold and remarkable. Do it every day. Your code is worth it.

This is why I think it is imperative that developers are involved in the marketing of their product. It is important to push the marketer but you also need to take responsibility to help lead the marketing.

Great coverage of Higgins

David Berlind has been providing some great coverage of Eclipse Higgins at the Harvard Identity Mashup conference. His first posting provides a nice introduction and a great demo via some screen shots. Well worth the read. This was followed up by a post today that features a Q&A with Mary Ruddy and includes snippets such as ‘the star of the show: The Higgins Trust Framework‘ and ‘from relative obscurity to industry rock stardom in the identity world by a handful of almost equally obscure people’.

It is great to see an Eclipse project receiving this level of recognition. Congratulations to Paul and Mary. While I have certainly never found Paul and Mary to be obscure :-), I do agree with David that their leadership has been intrumental to the success of this project.

Podcast: Wall Street Analyst talks about the Eclipse Effect

What is the business benefit of Eclipse? We often get asked this question, so we decided to ask Dana Gardner to explore the answers to this question through a series of podcasts.

The first in a series of three podcast features Brent Williams, a senior analyst from Key Banc Capital Markets discusses his view Eclipse is having on the software industry. He gives an interesting perspective on how Eclipse changes how software gets built and used by IT departments.

If you are looking for a high-level business view of Eclipse, I’d highly recommend taking a listen or read the transcript.

btw, expect two more podcasts exploring the same question over the next couple of weeks.

Playback of Eclipse Webinars

Today, we ran that last of the 3 webinars featuring different projects included in Callisto. If you are interested, the webinars were recorded and are available for playback. Each webinar is about 50-60 minutes in length. The feedback we have received has been very positive, so it maybe worth your time to take a look.

Here is a complete listing of the webinars and playback url. More information about the webinars can be found here.

1. Building Data-Centric RCP Applications.
2. Developing and Profiling Web Services.
3. Using the Eclipse Modeling Frameworks.

Thanks again to Adobe for contributing access to the Breeze meeting facility. If you are looking to host a webinar of your own, I would highly recommend looking at Breeze.

Time to try Callisto

Timothy O’Brien has written about his experiences using the Callisto release candidates. Congratulations to the Callisto team, it seems like you’ve make Timothy a happy user.

I also think Timothy has captured the essence of the Eclipse community:

It differs from other “open-source” communities in that it feels both more open and more focused on software development. While some might disparage the approach as a corporate driven approach to open source and community, Eclipse feels less like a faceless corporation and more like a consortium of interested parties, and the quality of the releases is proof enough that this model is working.

Tim, thanks for the nice comments.