I am Eclipse Rant

Steve’s recent post titled ‘I am Eclipse‘ made me think about a famous Canadian advertising campaign titled ‘I am Canadian‘; you probably need to be Canadian to really appreciate it. However, it makes me wonder if someone wants to do an ‘I am Eclipse’ rant?

Nominations Now Open for the Eclipse Awards

The nominations are now open for the Eclipse Community Awards. Last year, the first year for these awards, the winners were announced at EclipseCon 2006 and they were a great success.

This year we are going with the similar categories for individual and technology awards. The one new addition is a new individual award called the Newcomer Evangelist. This award will go to the person who answered the most questions posted on eclipse.newcomer newsgroup.

The deadline for nominations is January 22, 2007. So if you have a favorite committer, community member or product, now is the time to nominate them.

Why does Eclipse Momentum Keep Going?

Recently, there has been a indicators that Eclipse momentum continues to grow. Denis complaining that we continue to run out of bandwidth; Evans Data saying we are challenging Visual Studio and even the fact in October we had 800K download requests of the SDK. Given we already have dominate share in the Java IDE space, it is a bit perplexing the continued momentum? However, I think I am seeing a trend….

I think Eclipse is starting to hit the masses in the C/C++ and PHP community. This is all very unscientific but I’ve noticed that whenever CDT is mentioned on digg.com, if gets a lot of votes. The Linux community has lots of C/C++ developers and we are making great progress with our distros projects and awards from Linux magazines. It also seems CDT is now the defacto C/C++ IDE in the embedded market and is the base C/C++ IDE for most embedded commerical solutions.  There is just a lot of interest in CDT.

Now PHP seems to be taking off. The downloads of the Eclipse PHP IDE project is amongst the most popular, and this is even before a 1.0 release. This blog post also indicates PHP developers quickly fall in love with Eclipse. Is Eclipse reaching into a new community of developers?

Maybe, it is something else….

Linux Journal Editors’ Choice 2006

Linux Journal announced their Editors’ Choice 2006 and Eclipse won the award for Software Development Tool.   Great to see Eclipse being recognized in this Journal and another great indication of Eclipse’s momentum in the Linux community.   Congratulations to everyone!

Eclipse Birthday Card Winners

We have the winners!   As part of our birthday celebrations, we are giving away Eclipse sweaters to 20 individuals who signed our birthday card.   We had over 2400 people sign the card, so the 20 randomly selected individuals are……

• Karol Kleibl
• Arockia Samy
• Dominik Najder
• Neo Wang
• Krystian Kowalski
• Paulo Merson
• Jordan Beseiso
• Ram Gole
• Amr Ali
• Guy Lubovitch
• Matej Usaj
• Li Weibo
• Cedric Beust
• Alexander Haselsberger
• David Cole
• Rafael Rodriguez
• Dan Becker
• Cher Piau
• Deon Moolman

Congratulations to everyone; your sweater is on its way.

btw, for those quick readers, you will notice there are only 19 names.   The 20th person has yet to confirm their address, etc.   We will keep drawing names until we find someone that answers our e-mail. 

The Coming Eclipse of Visual Studio

Some Monday mornings you just know it is going to be a great week.

This morning in my e-mail I find a Google alert with the title ‘The Coming Eclipse of Visual Studio‘. The article is based on a press release from Evans Data that indicates in Europe/EMEA Eclipse is closing in on Visual Studio as the dominant IDE. Also, equally impressive is that the usage of Eclipse RCP is expected to triple over the next 2 years.

As point out in the article, Eclipse usage is growing in popularity with Java but also C++ and PHP developers. Therefore, it was great to see this blog post from a C++ developer recommending what features Microsoft should steal from Eclipse.

Cool RCP Stuff

In the past two days, I’ve come across two new interesting RCP applications.

Collaber is a collaboration framework that is built on RCP.   One point of interest is that is seems to be developed in Hyderabad, India.  It really seems like the Eclipse community is growing strong in India.

 Wazaabi looks very cool.  They seem to have combined RCP and XUL.  I haven’t taken a close look but their success stories look great.

This is the great thing about the Eclipse community.  News things are popping up everyday, everywhere.

Agile ALM and Mylar

Cote from Redmonk has written an interesting article about ALM tools for Agile programming. He points out that Mylar looks like an interesting platform for integrating tools, people and processes.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been spending a fair bit of time talking to people about Mylar and listening to Wayne rave about it. Originally, I had not thought about Mylar as the way Cote had described it. However, the more I learn about its ability to integrate different tools and task lists, I think Cote might be on to something.

For those people that are using Mylar do you agree with Cote that Mylar is a potential platform for Agile ALM?

Denis is a winner!

Well at least he got honourable mentioned as one of the top system admins out over 5000 nominees. Congratulations to Denis. He certainly deserves it.