Borland DevCo Reaches out to the Eclipse ecosystem

The JBuilder team at Borland, sometimes known as DevCo, is gearing up for the release of Peleton. As part of the launch they are inviting Eclipse plug-in vendors to participate in their partner program.

I’m really looking forward to the upcoming release of Peleton. It should be a great addition to the Eclipse community.

Gartner Open Source Mastermind Panel

The Gartner Open Source Conference is on this week in Phoenix and Mike Milinkovich was participating in a ‘Mastermind Panel‘. Luckily Zack Urlocker of MySQL took great notes and posted them on his blog. I think it makes for an interesting read.

One thing that really surprised me, and Mike confirmed this to me, was the fact that the majority of the audience claimed they looked at the open source code and 30-40% actually modified it. You often hear from open source doubters that no one really looks or modifies the source code; basically downplaying the importance of having the source code available. However, hear is a group of mainstream IT people (this is generally the target audience forGartner) claiming they do in fact use the source code. I find this to be pretty interesting….

Eclipse RAP Webinar

Today, we just completed a webinar on the Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform (RAP) project. If you were not able to attend but are interested in learning more about RAP, a recording can be found here.

We have two more webinars coming up in October on CDT and Mylar. More information and registration information can be found here.

btw, I continue to be very impressed with the results we get from these webinars. Over 100 people attended the RAP session and the feedback was very positive. It seems like a great channel to communicate technical content. Also, the Adobe Breeze facility works like a charm. I highly recommend it, if you are thinking of doing your own webinars.

Eclipse Events in Europe

October is turning out to be a good month for Eclipse events in Europe. The Eclipse Foundation is organizing the Eclipse Summit Europe in Germany. I believe there are still spots open, if you are interested in attending.

There is also an Eclipse event on Paris, France on October 13, organized by TNI Software.

Finally, although not Eclispe specific, JAOO in Denmark on Oct. 1-6 has Jeff McAffer talking about Eclipse Equinox and Eclipse RCP.

More Eclipse Webinars

We are organizing another series of Eclipse webinars. During Callisto, we ran a series of three webinars and got good response. This time we are featuring CDT, Mylar and Rich AJAX Platform (RAP). These webinars should be a good way to get a better understanding of these projects.

Go here for more details and registration information.

SAP Scripting Toolkit

SAP TechEd is going on this week in Las Vegas, so there seems to be more developer oriented news about SAP this week. Ryan Lowe is at SAP TechEd doing some presentations on RadRails. In Ryan’s blog he points out that SAP has introduced a new SAP Scripting Language Toolkit that includes RadRails, PHPEclipse, EMF and some other Eclipse based plug-ins.

It seems this is another good example for my previous post about partnering made easier due to the Eclipse ecosystem.

Eclipse and Microsoft: Parallel Universes

Just came across an intersting blog entry from David Beers. He makes a point that a MS concept called Composite UI Application Block (CAB) is very similar to Eclipse RCP. However, for me his comment:

What is funny is that RCP and CAB are obviously “big news” in their respective worlds, yet those worlds are so isolated that I’ve never heard anyone refer to both in the same sentence, much less compare or contrast them.

is very insightful. I agree that the Eclipse and Microsoft developer communities appear to be very isolated. The question is how can we start to build bridges?

Congratulations to Mik Kersten

Congratulations to Eclipse committer Mik Kersten for winning what looks like a very prestigious competition in Singapore. The competition was for PhD students to present business plans on the technology they are building as part of their thesis. As many might know, Mik is the leader of the way cool Mylar project and his business plan was about integrating Mylar with commercial products and services.

Open source and business models are a very hot issue in the open source community. It is great to see an Eclipse community member receiving recognition in this area. Congrats Mik!

Eclipse Marketing Symposium

We are getting ready for the second Eclipse Marketing Symposium on Sept. 20 in Dallas TX. The goal of the symposium is to bring together the marketng and business development professonials of Eclipse Foundation member companies to discuss the best practices of marketing to the Eclipse market. We held the Symposium last year and got great feedback, so we are doing it again.

This year we have a great line-up of speakers and presentations.

• Michael Goulde from Forrester Research will kick off the sessions by presenting his open source research.
• Maher Massi from Genuitec will present market research and demographic information about the Eclipse community;
• We will have a panel discussion on ‘Competing with Open Source Solutions’
• Alan Zeichick from BZ Media will talk about ‘How to Get Good Press Coverage’
• Peter Ryce from Adobe will talk about ‘Best Practices for Developer Webinars’
• Finally a panel discussion on ‘Viral Marketing and Evangelism’

It should be an interesting afternoon. If you would like to attend, please take the time to register here. Just so you know, unfortunately you need to be an employee of an Eclipse member company to attend.

Goodbye Blogger; Hello WordPress

I have finally made the move off blogger.com. Most people recommended that I move to wordpress, so here I am. My new blog url is ianskerrett.wordpress.com and my feed stays the same at http://feeds.feedburner.com/IanSkerrett.

The move was pretty painless. WordPress has a cool utility for importing all of my blogger.com posts and comments. The only hitch was my feed showed the last 10 posts as being new, so people on planeteclipse got to see these post again. Sorry about that.

So far wordpress seems a LOT better than blogger.com. Although anything would be better than blogger, since it is pretty apparent that Google has basically abandoned it.