Calling All Aspiring T-Shirt Designers

Each year the Eclipse Foundation gives out Eclipse t-shirts at JavaOne.  This year we are asking for help to design the shirt.   For those Eclipse fashion police, this is your chance to put your money where you mouth is.  Please submit your ideas via this bug.

Top OS Influencers

eWeek has published their list of the top 15 Open Source Influencers. I think it represents a pretty good cross section of people that are currently deeply involved with open source software. Of course I am also biased since Mike Milinkovich is #3 on the list. Congrats Mike!

Of course not everyone agrees, for instance Marc Fleury seems to be a bit put out, and Stephen Vaughan-Nichols mentions some names that he thinks are missing.

EclipseCon 2008 Demographics

Each year I try to report on the demographics of the EclipseCon attendees; here are the 2007 and 2006 reports. We collect this information when people register for the conference. It is optional, so not everyone responded but we have about 1300 responses.

Years of Experience with Eclipse

Similar to last year, a majority of attendees are experienced Eclipse users with more than 2 years of experience. I also think it is nice to see people with little experience coming to EclipseCon; it is certainly a great learning experience.

Developer, Developer, Developers

For those marketing people that felt a bit out of place, well there was a reason. EclipseCon is a techie show, 66% of respondents were developers or architects. Very similar to last year.

Type of Company

For the first time, we have more people using Eclipse for internal use (40%) than ISVs (37%). In previous years, attendees employed by ISVs were the most prevalent. This might be an indication that Eclipse frameworks, like EMF, Equinox and RCP, are being used more and more by internal IT groups for building applications.

Most Popular Projects

No surprise that JDT continues to be the most popular project but interestingly enough, fewer people actually claimed they were using JDT. However, projects like CDT, Equinox, RCP, EMF, GMF, and others have more people. Obviously lots of people will continue to use JDT but I think this shows people are 1) using more of the frameworks to build their applications, and 2) in general people are using a more diverse set of Eclipse projects. This is great news for the entire Eclipse community.

Early Registration for Eclipse RCP Training

If you missed EclipseCon or you want in-depth Eclipse RCP training, then consider registering for a 4-day RCP course in a city near you.   If you register before March 31, you will receive a 10% discount on the regular price.

Courses will be offered in 22 cities from May 19-June 13.  For those looking to mix business and pleasure, check out the course being offered in Hilo Hawaii.   Hmm, maybe I need to brush up on my RCP education…

OSGi and Equinox Book in German

Equinox and OSGi were definitely the buzz of EclipseCon.  Now it is great to see a new German book ‘The OSGi Service Platform - An introduction with Eclipse Equinox‘ about to be published.   There is a lot of interest in Germany about Equinox so this book should do very well.   

Nationalities at EclipseCon

EclipseCon is done but there is one last party, the European party. Lots of people asked me about the number of people from Europe, so I thought it would be interesting to post the breakdown of attendees by country.

Thank you to everyone that made the long trip to Santa Clara. Safe trip home.

Country
United States	937
Canada	129
Germany	81
France	38
Sweden	38
United Kingdom	23
Switzerland	18
Korea, South	17
Japan	15
Denmark	11
Austria	9
Russia	8
Netherlands	7
Spain	7
Turkey	7
Czech Republic	6
India	6
Italy	6
Norway	6
Brazil	4
Belgium	3
Bulgaria	3
Ireland	3
Israel	3
Poland	3
Argentina	2
China	2
Hungary	2
Romania	2
Croatia	1
Greece	1
Iran	1
Luxembourg	1
Malaysia	1
Mexico	1
Nicaragua	1
Ukraine	1

New products at EclipseCon

I spent sometime in the exhibit hall talking to vendors and seeing a number of companies showing off brand new Eclipse based products.

First stop was at the AMD booth to see their CodeSleuth product, a Java profiling tool that they have open source.

RIM has also announced their new Eclipse based Java Development Environment. RIM has an existing Java IDE, so this will compliment their tools solutions.

Skyway Software is introducing an interesting new RIA development tool that takes an MDA style approach. Looks like it make heavy use of EMF, GEF, etc.

Replay Solutions were demoing their new playback tool that was originally developed as a testing tool for the gaming industry.

Embarcadaro launched their new SQL IDE called PowerSQL.

and Protecode were showing off their new automated records management tools for logging IP.

Nice to see lots of innovation continues to happen in the Eclipse ecosystem.

A Great First Step for Microsoft and Eclipse

Sam Ramji today announced that MS would be investing in the development of SWT on WPF.  This is great news for Eclipse and Microsoft for two reasons:

1) Having more resources to work on SWT, especially with the deep knowledge of WPF, will make Eclipse better on Vista.   This will allow for tighter integration of Eclipse based products on Vista.  This is good news for developers building RCP based applications for Vista and WPF.

2) This definitely shows Microsoft is starting to understand the promise and potential of working with open source.  As Sam pointed out today, MS makes money from selling their platform.   Open source projects can help sell and add value to the MS platform.  If MS supports different open source projects, it is actually good business for Microsoft.  Lets hope we see more of this attitude from MS.

This is just the first step.  Talk is cheap, so the hard work is to get the right engineers working together to make this happen.  Time will tell to see how fast this can happen.
Lets hope next year at EclipseCon, Microsoft will be talking about their plans to extend CDT to support C# and new Eclipse-based tools for Silverlight.

Working Together: Sun Glassfish and EclipseLink

In addition to the Equinox announcement, we did a second press release that I think it is very significant and a great example of open source and open standards working together.   EclipseLink has been chosen by Sun to be the reference implementation for JPA 2.0.  The Glassfish team has also decided to ship EclipseLink in Glassfish 3.0.

As Ludovic Champenois pointed out,

Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to be the first press release ever done mentioning those 2 names: Eclipse Foundation and Sun Microsystems.

I think he is correct and congratulations are in order for the EclipseLink and Glassfish team for making this happen.  In the end, providing great solutions to difficult technical problems made this happen.  It is good news for the Java community.

btw, some people have already asked me, ‘Does this mean Sun is joining Eclipse?’.   No it does not.  This announcement is about two communities working together to drive adoption of a solution.  It is a great example of how Eclipse and different Sun communities can work together; regardless of Sun’s membership status at Eclipse.   I hope we see more of these efforts in the future.

And the Winnners are…

Tonight we announced the winners of the Eclipse Community Awards. The winners this year represent a great cross-section of the Eclipse community.

In the individual category,

• Ed Merks, blogger/photographer/modeler extraordinaries won the Top Ambassador
• Chris Aniszczyk (zx) of PDE fame took the Top Committer
• Remy Suen, a student at the University of Waterloo exemplifies the true spirit of contribution by his involvement on #eclipse IRC, so it was great to see him win Top Contributor
• and Eric Rizzo, an independent consultant from Florida shows a similar spirit by answering questions on the eclipse.newcomer newsgroup. For this he was selected as the Top Newcomer Evangelist.

These four are great representatives of everyone who passionately contribute to Eclipse.

In the technology category,

• Wind River Workbench won the Best Commercial Developer Tool award demonstrating the depth and quality of Eclipse products in the device and embedded market.
• EclEmma, who was a finalist last year, won the Best Open Source Developer Tool.
• XMIND 2008 won the Best Commercial RCP Product. XMIND Ltd is based in China and is the first time a Chinese product has won an award.
• MyTourBook, for the cyclist and GPS enthusiasts, won the Best Open Source RCP project.
• and finally, Band XI Cyrano won the first ever Best Commercial Equinox Application.

Congratulations to all the winners.   Also special thanks to the companies that donated prizes: Nokia, Motorola, Oracle and Sybase.