Eclipse PluginFest

An important success of the Eclipse ecosystem is the diversity of vendors that have created Eclipse-based products and/or Eclipse plug-ins that complement Eclipse-based products. This diversity has provides IT shops and end users a wide selection of options to address their development tool requirements. A challenge of this diversity is to maintain compatibility and interoperability between the different tool solutions.

We have been kicking around the idea of interoperability testing for some time, so I am really excited to announce that we are organizing the very first Eclipse PluginFest. The idea is to bring together a subset of the Eclipse vendor and user community to test for tool interoperability and compatibility.

Eclipse PluginFest will be held January 23/24 2007 in London, UK. The focus is on organizations and users that are building solutions that address the needs of embedded and mobile development. Symbian has graciously agreed to sponsor and host this event. In addition, we expect Wind River, QNX, Lynuxworks, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, ARM and others to participate. If you are interested in participating, more details can be found here.

Congratulations to the Eclipse Linux Distros Project

The Linux Distros Project just passed their creation review. I think this really shows the power and breadth of the Eclipse community. All of the major Linux distros, Novell/SuSe, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat/Fedora are participating in this project. Their stated goal is to ‘Bring Eclipse technology to Liunx distribution users’. What better group of organizations to work on this goal.

There is great potential for Eclipse in the Linux community with projects like CDT, PHP IDE, JDT, RCP, etc. Having these people on-board helping make it happen can only be goodness.

JBuilder 2007 Released

I have a soft spot in my heart for Borland. As with many people, Turbo Pascal was the first IDE I used and I even did some programming with Turbo Prolog. So it is great to see that Borland’s CodeGear has announced the release JBuilder 2007. Previously named Peleton, JBuilder 2007 is the Eclipse-based version of JBuilder and based on the feature list it seems like a pretty complete package.

Good luck to the people at CodeGear. JBuilder 2007 is going to be a great addition to the Eclipse community.

Upcoming Webinars featuring Eclipse RCP and AJAX Toolkit Framework

We have three new webinars scheduled over the next couple of weeks.

1. Coming up this week on Tuesday November 21, Building a Great GUI using Eclipse RCP features two Eclipse Platform committers: Kevin McGuire and Boris Bokowksi. Go here to register.
2. On December 14, another RCP webinar titled ‘Packaging and Deploying Applications based on Eclipse RCP‘. Go here to register. Both these webinars are part of the RCP webinar series that is being sponsored by Palamida, Instantiations and IBM.
3. Finally, we will be featuring a webinar on the new Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) on November 30. I saw a demo of ATF back in September and it looks like a very cool project. More details to register can be found here.

Birthday card greetings

The Eclipse Birthday Card has been a great success. Over 2000 people have signed the card. We are planning to keep the card active until the end of November and then we will do a randon draw to giveaway 20 Eclipse sweaters.

A couple of things that jumped out at me from the birthday card summary information : 1) we have a LOT of Eclipse users in India. Sitting in Ottawa, sometimes it is really hard to get the pulse of the entire Eclipse community but it seems like Eclipse is thriving in India. 2) Close to 25% of the people that signed the card started using Eclipse with version 3.1 or 3.2, ie in the last 2 years. Nice to see new developers continue to find Eclipse.

I have been scanning all the greetings that people have left. I would like to thank everyone who has spent the time signing the card. For those people that don’t have the time to scan 2000 message, I’ve reproduce some of the greetings here.

Been working with Eclipse since its early stages as a VisualAge follow on. Started using it as a production development environment with version 0.9. It’s been a fun ride. The platform has come along way!
- Ray Elenteny

Birthday.getinstance(Eclipse.getInstance(5)).congratulations(); do{ Eclipse.getInstance().releaseSuccess(); }While(true)
- ANDRES

Since June 2005, we start to develop an Eclipse RCP based application called KDKlipse (vendor=BBS Inc, Tokyo, Japan). Eclipse makes our dream coming to true. Thanks a lot.
- Feng Dihai

Happy Birthday Eclipse! I’m a total newbie but my first steps with you made me suddenly fall in love with you!
- Marc

I am a professor and I have been trying to get Eclipse used in my department for 5 years, since I first heard about Eclipse. This year we finally started using it in two of our courses and our students love it. Happy Birthday!
- clement allen

The first IDE that I preferred to Emacs. I simply cannot do anything without it now!
- Daniel Le Berre

Happy Birthday Eclipse! You’ve been making our lives much more interesting all these years!
- IntelliJ IDEA Team

I really appreciate the greetings from the IntelliJ team. I have a lot of respect for those guys.

Eclipse and Open Source Java

For those readers that might have missed the big news, Sun announced they were releasing their implementation of Java under the open source GPL license. I’ve probably spent far too much time reading the different coverage but in my books David Berlind has the best analysis and InfoQ had the best early coverage.

So how does all this impact Eclipse? I am sure much smarter people in the Eclipse community will have more insight but a couple of thoughts.

1. This is just good news for the Eclipse and the entire Java community. Who can argue that more open source software, especially Java, is not a good thing. At a minimum it will open doors in the Linux and Free Software communities. More people using Java can only be good for Eclipse.

2. The choice of GPL seems like the most logical choice for Sun. Obviously, if they had chosen a more BSD/Apache/Eclipse style license, it would have been easier for the Eclipse community to embrace. However, Eclipse today ships on top of Linux, so I can’t see this being a big problem. The one interesting angle is that it might actually allow organizations buildling RCP based applications to create a complete bundle and not require the JRE as a separate install. I am no lawyer, but with the classpath exception, this does seem like it is possible.

3. Not surprisingly, Sun has made a tight tie-in with open source Java and NetBeans. (Remember they have been pushing NetBeans to anyone that downloads the JDK for at least the last 2 years.) They seem to be providing via the NetBeans update center, a version of the source code that is easily downloadable and buildable in NetBeans.

I will make a fearless prediction that someone in the Eclipse community will do the same for Eclipse. Doug has already talked about doing a tutorial for CDT. Sure it would be nice to have Sun provide the Eclipse files directly from OpenJDK but it really isn’t in Sun’s best interest. A good analogy is when Sun wanted Eclipse to run on Solaris they actually provided the commiter to make it happen.

If the Eclipse community values having the open source Java available in Eclipse project files, someone will step up to make it happen. I guess one questions that remains, is will the openJDK community accept such a contribution. Governance does matter but Sun still needs to decide how such decisions would be made.

Overall, congratulations to Sun. A big, bold move that some people wanted a lot sooner but they have done it. Now time will tell the success of the move.

Coolest Eclipse 5 Swag - So Far

The party pictures are starting to show up on Flickr. So far, IMHO Tel Aviv has the best swag. Check out the cool Eclipse 5 Tel Aviv T-Shirt. I am not sure who is the gentleman in the picture but I know Eden Klein from Zend organized the party.  Eden, where can I get one of those shirts.

btw, more pictures can be found on flickr with the eclipse5 tag.

Party time next week in Munich and Delft

The response has been great to the Eclipse parties. We are now up to 32 parties around the world. We just added parties in Delft, Netherlands and Munich, Germany.

The party in Munich is going to be at the W-JAX conference, which is happening next week. They expect to have over 500 people, so I think this will be the largest party. If you are in Munich the W-JAX conference organizers are extending an invitation for everyone to attend the Eclipse Munich party; you don’t have to be a conference attendee but please RSVP.

Looking back in time at Eclipse

I have been looking around to find references to Eclipse when it was first launched. There is lots of stuff but here are some of the more interesting things:

• the original press release announcing the eclipse.org consortium
• thanks to the Wayback machine, the eclipse.org web site, circa Sept. 25, 2001.
• the original announcement was reported on CNN
• a detailed article on JavaWorld that talk about how Eclipse could impact the Java tools market.
• bug #1 in bugzilla
• Philipp Tiedt was kind enough to post a screenshot of Eclipse 1.0

What else would you add? Feel free to add a link in the comments section.