Eclipse RCP Training Series: Where can I get training on Eclipse RCP?

We often get asked ‘How can I get training on Eclipse RCP?’ usually from developers or development managers that want to start a project using RCP. In fact, there are a number of companies in the Eclipse community that offer great Eclipse and specifically Eclipse RCP classes that are listed on EPIC.

We have also decided to launch an Eclipse RCP Training Series in collaboration with some of these companies. For a period of three weeks, from Sept. 17-Oct 5, the Eclipse RCP Training Series will offer RCP classes in 13 different European and American cities. The classes will last 4 days, be instructor led, with lots of hands on tutorials and examples.

For anyone building your first RCP application these classes should be for you. Many of the companies involved are offering the training at reduced rates, so hopefully more people will be able to take advantage of the offer. Also, if you register before August 31 you will get a 10% discount on the normal price.

Europa Reviews: What do you think about Europa?

Before the launch of Europa, we started a contest to encourage the Eclipse community to write reviews about projects included in the Europa release. Anyone writing a review would receive an Eclipse shirt and the top 3 reviews would receive extra swag.

So far over 50 reviews have been written. It is nice to see reviews written in Chinese, Germany, Italian, Swedish and of course English. Thanks to everyone that has written one. There is some really great information in these reviews so check out the complete list here.

July 31 is the deadline to participate in the contest. If you have something to say about Europa, write a review and then post a link on dzone and e-mail europa-reviews@eclipse.org with a link. Wayne Beaton will be announcing the top 3 winners in early August.

New EPIC Home Page

We have just launched a new version of the EPIC home page.   The focus was making it easier to navigate the plug-in catalog and place less emphasis on the news section.   We also introduced a new banner, similar to the Eclipse Live style.  You might notice too the icons in the top right hand corner that provides easy navigation to eclipse.org, Eclipse Live and PlanetEclipse.  We are planning to roll out new banners for most of our web sites over the next weeks.

I hope you like the new home page.   Feel free to leave comments here or for detailed feedback open a bug.

Eclipse Summit Europe

Registration is now open for Eclipse Summit Europe. There is a limit of 400 attendees, so register now so you won’t be disappointed and save a few Euros on the early registration fees.

Making Eclipse the Linux IDE

Last week, LinuxWatch and eWeek published an article ‘Linux developers considering move to Eclipse‘. The article summarizes a breakout session at the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. The result of the session was:

[....], it was decided to start making Eclipse, the open-source development platform, the Visual Studio for Linux.

To me this is a great example of the Eclipse ecosystem in action. A group of people from different organization, in this case the different Linux distros and the Russian Academy of Science, have identified a need and are now collaborating together to make it happen. This is how innovation happens on an open platform and in an open community.

btw, I think they are well on their way to making Eclipse the Linux IDE.   The Linux Distros Project has been great catalyst for this and I think CDT and the PDT project are helping drive this forward too.

Jalecedo

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of hosting in Ottawa Kazumi Ohgata and Motoki Mori from NEC Soft in Japan.   NEC Soft’s VALWAY Technology Center is developing an interesting tool to make it easier to build RCP applications, called Jalcedo.  During our meeting we discussed the market for RCP tools, the success of Eclipse in Japan and we received a demo of Jalcedo.   A couple of thoughts:

• Mori-san showed us a market survey of developer tools in Japan.  It clearly showed Eclipse and Visual Studio were the only two dominant tools.  The interesting thing was that for large organizations, Eclipse was by far the leader; Visual Studio was more dominant in smaller organizations.
•  NEC is interested in receiving feedback on their Jalcedo tool.   If you are doing RCP development you might go take a look.

Dr Dobb’s Cover Story on Europa

It is a big deal to me when we get a cover story in a magazine. Therefore, I was thrilled to find out that Dr Dobb’s has  Eclipse Europa : Eureka! as its August cover. Congratulations to the Eclipse community; another great recognition for the release.

OS Summit Asia CFP Deadline in 8 days

The deadline for the OS Summit Asia Call for Papers is next Friday, July 13.   If you are thinking of submitting a proposal, now is the time to do it.

I also want to encourage people in China, Japan, Korea and greater Asia to submit papers.   An important goal of the conference is to help build an open source community in Asia.

Eclipse Europa Coverage So Far

The coverage of the Europa release has been great. In case you missed it, I thought I would share some of my highlights.

Analyst Coverage

• Cote from Redmonk probably had the best coverage by an analyst. Cote really gets this stuff.
• Joe Niski from Burton also did a nice overview of the release.
• I think Alex Fletcher has an interesting perspective on why Europa and the Eclipse release train is unique in the open source and software industry.
• Finally, Alan Zeichick was able to bring together the iPhone, GPL 3 and Europa releases into perspective.

Community Coverage

• I think Alex Blewitt from EclipseZone did a great series on what is new in Europa.
• I laughed when I read this post from Arun Gupta on Glashfish team watching the countdown. Now that is dedication. It is also great to see Glashfish supporting Europa.
• Mylyn is also getting some nice coverage, especially from this person who isn’t a fan of Eclipse but is attracted to Mylyn.

Not All Great
Not everything has been great. It looks like we need to do a better job at explaining the packages. Something to work on this week.

Lots of Reviews
There have been lots of reviews that you can check out, either at dzone or the list we are keeping at eclipse.org. Remember if you write a review before July 31, we will send you an Eclipse shirt.