OSGi Community Event – Call for Papers

This year the OSGi Alliance is holding their OSGi Community Event on September 22-23, 2009 in Redwood City.   The Eclipse Foundation is a member of the OSGi Alliance and I have been asked to act as the conference chair.

Today we announced the Call for Papers for the event.   The theme of the conference is really to focus on the benefits of using OSGi.  We are particularly interested in having enterprise IT organizations share their experiences of using and deploying OSGi-based solutions.   If you know of an organization that is using OSGi in their internal IT infrastructure, please encourage them to submit a paper.

Details for submitting proposals is available online.  Deadline for submissions is May 15, 2009.

Your chance to be a Rocket Scientist

Doesn’t everyone want to be a rocket scientist?    Here is your chance to use your Eclipse skills and work on the development of spacecraft operations software at NASA.  Seems like a pretty cool job.

The guys at NASA have been great supporters of Eclipse.   You can find out more about what they are doing with Eclipse from these case studies and EclipseCon presentation.  I hope they get some great rock star candidates to apply.

Calling All Graphic Artists

I am working on three projects that could use the assistance of a graphic artist or at least someone with Photoshop skills.   If you are so inclined, all contributions are appreciated.

1. We need a graphic for the upcoming Galileo release.  You can see what was done in previous years for Europa and Ganymede.  I have opened a bug to collect contributions for this year.

2. The Pulsar Working Group needs a graphic and logo.  Pulsar is the new working group that is defining a mobile tools platform.  Contributions can go here.

3. We want to create a new brand identity for Eclipse runtime technology.  Many people think of Eclipse as being tools but Eclipse has a growing base of technology that is used by applications at runtime.  The Eclipse Runtime PMC is the home to a lot of this technology, but components of BIRT, Modeling and others also have runtime components.  More details about the branding of EclipseRT have been posted on the RT Wiki.   Suggestions can be submitted here.

Get the creative juices going and start design those graphics. 

Designing an Eclipse Community Survey

We are making plans to field a survey of the Eclipse community.  The goal is to better understand how and what people are doing with Eclipse and open source in general.   We plan to open the survey next week and hope to publish the results in early June.

I would like to get some feedback on the actual survey questions.   We have already loaded a set of questions into surverymonkey.   Please let me know via comment or e-mail if you have any suggestions for 1) new questions or 2) new options to choose from.  As you go through the survery don’t worry about your answers, since we will be deleting any data entered up until April 15.

Google App Engine Support for Java and Eclipse

The big news today is Google’s announcement that Google App Engine will now support Java.  At the same time Google made available an Eclipse plugin to make it easier to write Java applications for App Engine.  This video provides a great demo of the Eclipse support.

Having Java support on App Engine raises a number of interesting possibilities:

1. What does it take to run Equinox on App Engine?  How would running Equionox and OSGi in the cloud change the requirements for the tooling and the OSGi standard?

2. If Equinox can run on App Engine, what are the other possibilities for things like RAP, ECF, etc.

3. Does it even make sense to have Eclipse IDE or maybe e4 running on App Engine?

4. What are the other possibilities for the Eclipse community?

Great to see Google’s support for Java and Eclipse.  It will be interesting to see what comes out of this announcement.

EclipseCon 2009 Demographics

Each year we ask EclipseCon registrants some questions to better understand who is coming to EclipseCon.  The questions are optional but we tend to get a good percentage of attendees responding.  I am a bit late writing up the responses, but better late than never.  For this interested, the 2008, 2007 and 2006 responses are also available.

Years of Experience Using Eclipse

The EclipseCon crowd is a hardcore set of Eclipse users, 68% had more than 3 years experience using Eclipse.  This was up from 60% last year, who claimed to have more than 2 years experience.   (NOTE: we changed that scale to reflect the longevity of Eclipse.)  There was also a big drop (23% to 9%)  in the number of people who are new to Eclipse or have less than 1 year of experience.

Developer, Developers, Developers

EclipseCon continues the traditional of attracting technical people, 66% identified themselves as a developer or architect; very similar to last year.

Role 2009

Types of Company

ISV’s continue to be the predominate type of organization sending people to EclipseCon.  However, this seems to be declining and more people that are using Eclipse for internal use, either as a tools platform or using Eclispe RCP/Equinox as a platform for their applications, are sending people to EclipseCon.   IMHO, this is a very nice trend to see at EclipseCon, since it broadens the entire Eclipse community.

Popular Projects

This year we asked the respondents to select which projects they were using. We used a slimmed down list since we just have too many projects to make someone read the entire list.  The numbers for this question seem to be down across the board, which indicates to me that many people just didn’t bother answering.  Next year I think we will have to significantly reword this question.

Presentations from the Open Source Executive Strategy Summit

Last week at EclipseCon, the Eclipse Foundation hosted our very first Open Source Executive Strategy Summit.    The goal was to bring together people to explore what open source strategies are working and what will work in the future.  Approximately 60 people attended the day long Summit and the feedback we received was all very positive.

Thanks to the speakers, we have been able to make available most of the presentations slides from the event.   Check out the Summit web page for links to the available presentations.

Symbian and Eclipse

Today is the first day of the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas, so it seemed like a good time to announce that the Eclipse Foundation has joined the Symbian Foundation and the Symbian Foundation has joined the Eclipse Foundation.   Eclipse and Symbian have been working together for a number of years;  Symbian Ltd. was an active member of the Eclipse community.   The creation of the Symbian Foundation and their decision to open source the Symbian technology created a new opportunity for the two organizations to work closely together.

An obvious area for collaboration is the fact that both organizations are not-for-profit Foundations that are stewards of their respective open source community and actively promote a commercial ecosystem around the technology.  This is a new model for industry collaboration and there is much to be learned.  We have and will continue to share best practices in this area with our Symbian colleagues.

The two communities also share a common license, the Eclipse Public License (EPL). We were very honoured to have Symbian choose the EPL for their license.  Now we share an opportunity to promote the EPL as a great license for doing business friendly open source development.

Finally, we look forward to Symbian’s participation in the new Eclipse Pulsar initiative.  Pulsar is an initiative announced in early March that will drive a common mobile tools platform.  Motorola, RIM, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, IBM and Genuitec have signed on to support Pulsar and it will be nice to add Symbian.  Having a universal tools platform is an important first step to making it easier for developers to create interesting and innovative mobile applications.

Please join me in welcoming the Symbian Foundation to the Eclipse community.  The mobile and open source spaces are certainly exciting so it is great to have close relationships with Symbian.