How Fast Do Users Upgrade to Eclipse 3.3?

A couple people have asked me for data on how fast people upgrade to a new version of Eclipse or specifically 3.3.   Unfortunately, ‘data’ is difficult to get on Eclipse and in general open source.   However, here is what I can find:

• In the first two months after the Europa release we had 2.8 million downloads.   This does not equate to individual developers but I think it shows a lot of people have downloaded the new version.
• We did an informal poll on EPIC, to see how fast people were planning to update.   it showed that 90%+ would upgrade within 6 months.
• BZ Media does an annual survey of Eclipse usage in Nov/Dec. time frame.  Of those people that are using Eclipse, around 65% are using the latest version.

Based on this, I typically estimate that 50-65% of the Eclipse community has upgraded to the lastest version within 6 months of release.   I am interested if other people think this seems reasonable based on your experiences.

Meet the committers at Eclipse World

The Eclipse Foundation party at Eclipse World is starting to take shape. At the party, we will have committers from 9 different Eclipse projects answering questions and showing off the latest and greatest features in their projects.

So, if you are going to Eclipse World, make sure you drop by our party on Wednesday night, November 7. You will get a chance to meet the committers from WTP, Modeling, BIRT, JSF Tools, GMF, Platform UI/RCP, Maya, RAP and EclipseLink.

btw, if you RSVP to (eclipse-world-party at eclipse.org) we are giving out a limited number of Eclipse t-shirts at the party.  As a reminder, party attendees need to be attendees of Eclipse World, so don’t forget to register for the conference.

g-Eclipse: an innovation network in action

The Eclipse community is very good at enabling innovation networks. Eclipse provides the ability for individuals and groups to create collaborative communities that drive innovation in a specific area. CDT is a great example but another up and coming project that appears to have an interesting community of committers is g-Eclipse.

g-Eclipse is trying to solve the problem of making grid computing more accessible to developers. To make this happen a consortium of universities and companies are collaborating on the development of some pretty interesting tools to access computation grids. Eclipse is providing not only the technology platform but the IT infrastructure, IP sharing framework and development process that make it possible to quickly create innovative new solutions.

Eclipse Live is hosting a webinar on g-Eclipse next week, Tuesday, October 30. Sign up now, if you are interested in seeing the types of tools they are building.

Eclipse DemoCamp Are Ready To Roll

Based on my initial post, we now have Eclipse DemoCamps being organized in 14 cities around the world, including Budapest, Beijing, Sofia, Chicago, Ottawa, Palo Alto, Toronto and others.

The goal of the DemoCamps is to organize local events where individuals can show off the interesting things they are doing with Eclipse and also have an opportunity to meet other Eclipse users in your city. Each city has a wiki site where you can see the details and also sign up to attend and/or demo. btw, some cities are still working on the details of the date and location but feel free to sign-up to show your interest.

If there isn’t a DemoCamp in your city, we are still looking for more organizers, so why not consider organizing one.

Going to Eclipse World

I just registered for Eclipse World. I always enjoy this conference, since I get to actually attend as an attendee, unlike EclipseCon, where I never seem to have time to attend the sessions.

btw, if you are planning on going, the early registration deadline is tomorrow, October 19. Also, don’t forget to RSVP to our party we are organizing at Eclipse World.

Google Reader Subscribers

Google has just released a feature in Google Reader that allows you to see how many people have subscribed to a feed. I thought it would be interesting to check out some the RSS feeds at eclipse.org. As a reminder, these are just people using Google Reader so the actual number of subscribers is larger. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Eclipse Foundation news at 10,330. If you compare it to a list of top blogs, that puts the Foundation news feed in the top 40; not bad.

SAP Contributes Memory Analyzer to Eclipse

SAP made a big Eclipse announcement today at their SAP TechEd in Munich. They announced their intention to open source their memory analyzer at Eclipse. The tool already exists, so more information can be found here. It is great to see SAP making their first code contribution to Eclipse.

SAP also announced they purchased a Business Rules Management System company called Yasu Technology. Taking a look at their technical specification, it seems their products are build on-top of Eclipse. Seems like another great example of Eclipse enabling partnerships and acquisitions.

SAP has also been rolling out a steady stream of Eclipse based products; seems SAP demoed another Eclipse based product in Munich.

Great to see SAP’s commitment to Eclipse and open source. It will be fun to watch them roll out some of these products.

Open source projects at GOSCON

I am in Portland for the annual GOSCON conference, the government open source conference. I spoke at session this morning on using open source to adopt open standards; I think the session went well.

One of the reasons I wanted to come to GOSCON is that I believe the next wave of important open source projects will be implementations for specific vertical industries, ex. government systems. IMHO, different state, local and national governments can derive a lot of benefit by collaborating on open source projects. Therefore, I was please to see two early examples:

1. Gateway is an open source implementation of the US state sales tax reporting system, led by the State of Vermont. No other State is participating in the project but it seems to be early days. I asked the presenter what were some of the barrier and he said ‘a lot of the States use .Net and we use Java’. btw, they also use Eclipse.
2. CAPITS openRMS is a record management system for police forces. This project isn’t really open source, no OSI approved license, the code is only available to gov’t agencies and it doesn’t appear others can contribute. However, they seem to want to move in that direction but are probably an example of a ‘community’ source project. They seem to be having issues with generating participation and contribution from the community. It made me wonder if they were more open, if things would get better.

I also attended a really interested session by Tim Schweizer on Using Parallel Thinking to Promote Collaboration. An interesting workshop on a set of tools called ‘Six Thinking Hats‘ that seem to promote collaborative thinking. He also talked about  TRIZ , a method used to encourage innovative thinking. Tim claimed a lot of organizations are using TRIZ to drive their innovation networks. Both seem pretty interesting and I think I will head out to Powells in Portland to buy some books.

Announcing RAP 1.0 – the other press release

We are announcing the 1.0 release of Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) on Monday. I find the press releases I’ve been writing lately have been kind of boring. I also found this press release recently announced on O’Reilly Radar very refreshing. Therefore, I decided to write an alternative press release for RAP 1.0. The ‘real one’ is here but I kind of like this one better. What do you think?

PRESS RELEASE

Does the World Really Need Another Ajax Toolkit?

Well Eclipse is releasing another one called Eclipse RAP 1.0.

OTTAWA – October 15, 2007 – The Eclipse Foundation today announced the release of Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) 1.0, yet another Ajax toolkit. You might think, don’t we have too many Ajax toolkits already? We probably do but we think RAP 1.0 is pretty interesting and will help people who want to build Ajax applications using Eclipse.

The neat thing about RAP is that you write Ajax applications in Java and use the Eclipse component model based on OSGi. Think of it something like GWT but using Eclipse plugins. This means you can now architect your Ajax applications as extensible components. For large companies this is a big deal since they typically like to create architectures that help them re-use code in different applications.

The Eclipse community is pretty excited about RAP. During the creation review, lots of people vote +1, even before the review. Typically, it is difficult for us to get people to vote at all. There are also people that have already deployed applications based on RAP. For instance, this company in Spain has done an HR recruiting system with RAP. We have included a screenshot to show what they have done in RAP.

We also know of a really big company using RAP, trust us, but their marketing guys won’t let us talk about them. The thing these developers really like about RAP is the ability to build and deploy applications as RIA and RCP applications from a single code base. It is still not 100% perfect but the idea of using RAP to write an application once and then deciding to deploy it as a browser based RIA or desktop RCP application sounds pretty exciting to us.

If you want you to know more about the features, checkout the New and Noteworthy, or better yet download RAP and give it a try. Let us know what you think and if you like it, make sure you tell your friends.

Sun Joins OSGi Alliance

Earlier this week, I received a copy of the quarterly OSGi newsletter, including an interesting tibit about new members of the OSGi Alliance:

In the time since my last e-mail to members, the OSGi Alliance has welcome two new members. One of the, Sun Microsystems, is a previous (and actually founding) member, and the other, SAP, is brand new to the OSGi Alliance.  I welcome both of them and look forward to their participation and contributions to the OSGi Alliance.  In fact, both of these organizations have nominated candidates for the OSGi board — 

Nice to see SAP joining but I was surprised to see Sun joining!   Sure enough Sun is now listed as a member of the OSGi Alliance.  I wonder if this means Sun is warming up to OSGi; I wonder what it means for the future of JSR 277?