Eclipse Community Award Nominations

Thanks to everyone that sent in a nomination for the Eclipse Community Awards. We received 63 nominations in total, and looking at the different nominees I think the judges will have a difficult time selecting one winner. Good luck to everyone and make sure you attend the award ceremonies at EclipseCon to hear the winners announced.

Eclipse Live

As many readers will know, I am a big fan of technical webinars. In fact, we are now on track to do at least 2 webinars a month.

Over time I would also like to develop a database of podcasts and screencams/flash demos covering the different Eclipse projects. Right now we have lots of content but it is pretty difficult to find it.

Therefore, we are planning to launch, hopefully in February, a new web portal, called Eclipse Live. It will replace the current webinars page but also allow us to expand into podcasts, flash demos, etc. The plan is to allow anyone from the community to submit links to or original Eclipse related multi-media content. In my dream world it becomes a mini-YouTube specifically for Eclipse technical content.

I hope to share a preview of the site in the next couple of weeks. For now, here is a mockup of the Eclipse Live home page.

The birth of Aperi

There is a recent article titled Aperi stalled, dead even? It makes the point that Aperi is now available for download but who is going to use it? Actually a vendor, NetApps, who isn’t supportive of Aperi is asking the question. Gee, could this be some good old fashion PR spin in the works. I guess one good spin deserves another….

First, Aperi just had their first milestone release in January, so I think it is a bit too early to be asking who is using it. Actually, I hope no one is using it in their production products since it is not even a 1.o release.

Second, admittedly I don’t follow the storage management market but this type of spin just sounds like the traditional response to a new open source project; ignore it and claim it isn’t relevant. Successful open source projects first produce good code and develop an open transparent community. This attracts users and people who start to incorporate it into products you never imagined. I have seen this cycle for a lot of the Eclipse projects.

Therefore, I think we are really seeing the birth of Aperi. They now have code, so now the real conversation can begin; and the spin can be ignored.

Eclipse Forum India Call for Papers

A call for papers has been added to the Eclipse Forum India; deadline is February 6.  All you EclipseCon speakers, here is an opportunity to reuse your content. 

Wrap-up of Eclipse PluginFest

We wrapped up the Eclipse PluginFest last night and by all accounts people were very pleased with the outcome. 18 companies, 4 Eclipse projects and around 45 individuals attended the event at the Symbian offices in London. Most of the attendees were from the key vendors in the embedded and mobile market.

The objective of the PluginFest was to test the compatibility and interoperability between different Eclipse-based products. When we first started planning this event, I was a bit dubious how something like this would go? It turns out that things went really well. A lot of the products just worked. For example, plugins from Perforce, Subeclipse/Subversion and Klocwork got great results when added to a variety of Eclipse based IDEs. Some of the testing sessions uncovered issues but in many instances work-arounds or resolutions were identified. The results of the testing were posted on the Eclipse wiki.

Another great thing about an event like this is the networking opportunities. There were lots of hallway and white board conversations throughout the two days. One comment from an attendee was that ‘I would have had to travel for most of the year to meet everyone I did here’.

The general consensus was that we should do this type of event again. I would love to do it again and coming back to London next year would be great. Thanks to everyone for attending and thanks to Thibaut Rouffineau from Symbian for hosting and sponsoring the event.

Eclipse Forum India

S&S Media has just announced Eclipse Forum India to be held May 28-31 in Bangalore India.   This is great news.   There is a large growing Eclipse community in India, so it is nice to have an Eclipse oriented conference to serve it.

Will Microsoft Start an Eclipse Project?

James Governor started with ‘Microsoft Announces an Eclipse Project‘. Then Steve Wali follows up with his very insightful thought experiement for a Microsoft open source strategy. Part of his strategy is that MS should put Visual Studio into maintenance mode and start an Eclipse C# project. hmmmm…..

I actually think it would be very cool to have a Microsoft lead C# IDE at Eclipse. Lots of Eclipse users, also use Visual Studio. Most of Eclipse users are developing on Windows. There are also Eclipse plugins for MS Team Foundation Server. Why not offer Eclipse users one solution?

Microsoft wouldn’t need to give up Visual Studio; sorry Steve but if I was Microsoft, I wouldn’t give up Visual Studio. However, MS can easily afford the investment in multiple IDEs and the benefits of reaching out to the Eclipse and open source community seem to make this an easy decision? What do you think? Will MS will start and Eclipse project?

btw, interesting post about the differences between Visual Studio and Eclipse. I have seen this sentiment before; Eclipse is a tool built by developers for developers, Visual Studio is more for the drag’n drop crowd.

Eclipse Coming in From the Cold

As I have previously mentioned, Josh Reed was down in Antarctica participating in the ANDRILL project and using his Eclipse RCP application, called PSICAT,  to analyse the drill cores.  Josh is back and he has done a podcast with Jon Erickson of DDJ to explain his project.  Give it a listen.

Eclipse PluginFest Runs Next Week

I am heading to London, UK next week for the first ever Eclipse PluginFest.   I am really pleased with the way this is turning out.  We have 20 companies and over 40 individuals meeting at the Symbian offices in London.   More importantly we have great representation across the tool chain:IDEs, SCM tools, static analysis tools, modeling tools, etc.

The objective is to have 2 days of product interoperability testing.  We are using the wiki to start scheduling the testing sessions and I hope to publish the results at the same place.  This is the first time we have done something like this, so wish us luck. 

btw, a big thanks to Thibaut Rouffineau of Symbian for hosting and sponsoring the event.   We couldn’t have done it without him.

Give kudos to your favourite Eclipse products

Ahti has done a very nice summary of the current nominations for the Eclipse Community Awards Individual awards.   However, don’t forget you can also recognize your favourite Eclipse based product.

Nominations are trickling in, last year 80% came in the last week, but we need a lot more.  Feel free to nominate your favourite developer tool, RCP application or best enterprise deployment.   Deadline for nomination is January 22, 2007.

One thing that surprised me last year was that we did not get a lot of nominations for Best Open Source Development Tool.   Although last year RadRails was definitely a worthy winner; this year I’d like to get a lot more nominations for this category.