Most Popular Speakers and Sessions at EclipseCon 2013

There were a lot of great speakers and sessions at EclipseCon 2013. Based on the evaluations from attendees and estimate crowd sizes for each session, I am please to present the top 10 speakers and top 10 most popular sessions.

Most Popular Sessions

(Based on a rough count of attendees by the room monitor.)

1. The Art of Java Performance Tuning - Ed Merks
2. Modern UIs with JavaFX, OSGi, and e4 and the tooling provided by e(fx)clipse – Tom Schindl
3. Code Recommenders: Developers come and go but the code remains – Andreas Sewe and Marcel Bruch
4. Deploying Heterogeneous Artifacts to the Cloud with OSGi - Neil Bartlett
5. >Shake that FUD; How to migrate your Eclipse 3 legacy code to Eclipse 4 - Wim Jongman and Lars Vogel
6. EMF Dos and Don’ts – Maximilian Koegel and Edgar Mueller
7. Xtended JavaFX - Sven Efftinge and Thomas Schindl
8. Injection in Eclipse 4: All you need to know about it - Oliver Prouvost
9. Bling: The GPU powered Game IDE – Tony McCrary
10. Eclipse 4 Goes Formal: API You Can Rely On: – Eric Moffatt

Complete Results

Most Popular Speakers

(Based on attendee evaluations.  To make the list, the session needed to receive feedback from at least 15 attendees. This is a completely arbitrary number I selected since I wanted to make sure there was enough feeback from a variety of people.)

1. Sven Efftinge and Thomas Schindl - Xtended JavaFX
2. Dan Mezick - Scrum: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
3. Sven Efftinge - Internal DSLs with Xtend
4. Eike Stepper - Now that I’ve Got a Model – Where’s my Application?
5. Max Rydahl Andersen - A tale about a Big SVN to Git Migration
6. Wim Jongman and Lars Vogel - Shake that FUD; How to migrate your Eclipse 3 legacy code to Eclipse 4
7. Emilio Palmiero and Pascal Rapicault – Building an in-house Eclipse support team
8. Tamar Cohen - NASA uses Eclipse RCP applications for experiments on the International Space Station
9. Thomas Schindl - Modern UIs with JavaFX, OSGi, and e4 and the tooling provided by e(fx)clipse

(tied for 9th)

• Alexandra Schladebeck - Designing software with users and testers in mind
• Jan Sievers and Tobias Oberlies - Building Eclipse Plug-ins and RCP Applications with Tycho
• Mikael Barbero - EMF.Edit: the Force Unleashed!

Complete Results

 

There were a lot of other great speakers and sessions at EclipseCon.  Thank you to all the speakers who made the conference a great experience!

How to increase donations to an open source project

Lots of open source projects raise money from their user communities by soliciting donations.  Most open source projects will have the ‘Support’  or ‘Make a Donation’ button on their home page or download page. At Eclipse we have had the Friend of Eclipse program for a number of years to solicit financial support for our community.

Earlier this year, we started looking for ways to  increase the number of users making donations.  We have millions of people downloading Eclipse but very few making donations.  Inspired by Ubuntu’s new donation page and Mozilla’s download page we changed where and how we asked users to make the donation.

The first step was to create a simple and graphically appealing thank you page that requested the user to make a donation.  Next we changed where we asked for the donation. We presented the new donation page right after the user started to download Eclipse.  Now while the user is waiting for the download to complete they can make the decision to make a donation.  Note, we did not ask them before they started the download.

The results have been dramatic.  We have seen a 5-6 times increase in the number of people making donations.  We now have hundreds of people making a donation each month.

I wanted to share these results with everyone so other open source projects might be able to learn from our experience.  It was a relatively simple change.  Ask for a donation when the download is occurring not when a user is browsing the project site.

I also wanted to thank everyone for their support of the Eclipse community. It is great to have your support!

Most Popular Sessions at EclipseCon 2013 in Boston

Last week, I blogged about the most popular tutorials for EclipseCon.  Today I was looking at the sessions people have added to their own schedule.  From the data so far, here are the top 10 most popular sessions for next week (excluding the awesome keynotes):

1. The Art of Java Performance Tuning - Ed Merks
2. Eclipse 4 Goes Formal: API You Can Rely On: - Eric Moffat
3. Code Recommenders: Developers come and go but the code remains - Marcel Bruch
4. Shake that FUD; How to migrate your Eclipse 3 legacy code to Eclipse 4 - Wim Jongman and Lars Vogel
5. What’s new in the Http Service Specification - Felix Meschberger
6. Modern UIs with JavaFX, OSGi, and e4 and the tooling provided by e(fx)clipse - Tom Schindl
7. Eclipse 4.x: Tips on API best practices for a 3.x plugin running on both platforms - Paul Webster
8. It’s all about feedback – code review as a great tool in the agile toolbox - Stefan Lay and Matthias Sohn
9. The lessons of restructuring plugin-based software - Leo Dos Sontos
10. NASA uses Eclipse RCP applications for experiments on the International Space Station - Tamar Cohen

A great selection of talks and speakers.

As a reminder, anyone attending EclipseCon can log into the conference site and build their own schedule by selecting the star for each session you plan to attend.

See you next week and don’t forget to register.

Most Popular Tutorials at EclipseCon 2013

EclipseCon is less than two weeks away. Monday is tutorial day and people need to pre-register.  It is interesting to see what tutorials are the most popular:

1.  What every Eclipse developer should know about Eclipse 4 (e4) is easily the most popular tutorial and in fact is sold out.
2. Advanced Eclipse 4 Application Platform – not for the weak-hearted continues the Eclipse 4 theme and there is still room left.
3. Mastering OSGi with Ease is always a popular topic for EclipseCon and OSGi DevCon attendees.
4. Cloud Formation: Developing real world software, in the cloud with Orion shows there is increasing interest in Orion within the Eclipse community.
5. What every Eclipse developer should know about EMF is a tutorial every Eclipse developer should attend.
6. Advanced Git: Things you need to know about Git but were afraid to ask Git is the standard in the Eclipse community so I am not surprised to see a lot of interest in this tutorial.

There are also lots of other great tutorials and you still have time to sign-up.  See you in Boston.

 

 

Eclipse User Stories

I love hearing what people are doing with Eclipse.  It really is amazing the great software people have built on top of Eclipse.  This is why at EclipseCon, I love to attend the sessions where users show what they have been doing with Eclipse.  It is a great way to understand what is possible and what are the pitfalls.

This year is no exception and we have a great line-up of Eclipse user stories:

1. Eclipse RCP on the International Space Station

Over the years, NASA has been doing some cool stuff with Eclipse RCP but I think this is the first time Eclipse is going into space.  NASA presentations always have very cool demos/videos.

2. Bling: Using Eclipse for game development

Lots of gamers in the Eclipse community will want to check out how l33t labs is using Eclipse 4 to build a game development toolset.

3. Medical Imaging with Eclipse

Cerner is a huge health care company that is using Eclipse and OSGi for doing medical imaging.  It looks like they are doing some impressive UI and server side application delivery.

4. Simulate This!

Oak Ridge National Labs is using Eclipse to build an integrated computational environment that sets up large supercomputer simulations for physics and chemistry experiments.  They are using RCP, RAP, OSGi, Tycho and much more for building the environment.

5. Software Defined Radio

The US Gov’t DoD is creating the Redhawk IDE to support the creation of software defined radio applications.  OK, I admit I have no idea what software defined radio applications do but I do know the people at DoD do some fascinating stuff so I want to know more.

6. Telco Network Planning

NetXForge has been using Eclipse to build a telecommunication planning system for the Dutch mobile phone industry.  They are going to show how the have use EMF, CDO, xText, GEF to make this happen.

 

An impressive selection of applications people are doing building with Eclipse.  Join us at EclipseCon to learn more and be inspired to use Eclipse for new and innovative applications.

 

 

Adopting Eclipse 4

As many know, Eclipse 4 is now the default platform for the Eclipse community.  Many people in the community are now investigating how to migrate to Eclipse 4 and how to take advantage of the new platform capabilities.  A great source of information for people looking to adopt Eclipse 4 will be the wealth of Eclipse 4 sessions at EclipseCon 2013.

1. The Eclipse 4 Tutorials

We have Eclipse 4 experts and experienced tutorial leaders doing two Eclipse 4 tutorials on Monday. In the morning ‘What every Eclipse developer should know about Eclipse 4 (e4)‘ is a beginner tutorial given by Jonas Helming, Eugen Neufel and Kai Toedter.  Monday afternoon will be the  advanced tutorial ‘Advanced Eclipse 4 Application Platform – not for the weak-hearted‘ by Tom Schindl and Sopot Cela.

2. The Technical Sessions

During the week Eclipse 4 committers will be covering a number of topics relevant for anyone looking for adopt Eclipse 4, including:

• Styling Tips for the Refined RCP App
  
• Eclipse 4 Goes Formal: API You Can Rely On:
• Shake that FUD; How to migrate your Eclipse 3 legacy code to Eclipse 4 – PART 1
• Eclipse 4.x: Tips on API best practices for a 3.x plugin running on both platforms
• Modern UIs with JavaFX, OSGi, and e4 and the tooling provided by e(fx)clipse
• Injection in Eclipse 4: All you need to know about it

3. The Case Studies

We also have some case studies from companies that are already building applications built on Eclipse 4:

• Haliburton - Experiences porting a suite of massive Swing apps to Eclipse 4
• l33t labs -Bling: The GPU powered Game IDE
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory - Simulate This! – The Eclipse Platform as an Integrated Computational Environment

4. The Networking

A lot of the key Eclipse 4 committers and community members will be at EclipseCon so there will be plenty of opportunity to talk with the experts. I am sure there will be a BOF and lots of discussions in the hotel bar.

If you are looking to adopt Eclipse 4, EclipseCon is going to be a must attend.  I hope to see you in Boston.

Executive Events at EclipseCon

This year we are running two special ‘executive’ events at EclipseCon and ALM Connect: 1) Open Source Executive Summit and 2) ALM Connect Executive Day.  These events are meant to address the business issues and strategies IT executives need to consider when creating a modern software development team.

The Open Source Executive Summit will take place Tuesday, March 26. The theme of this event is using open source to drive open innovation.  Lots of organizations benefit from making extensive use of open source technologies. This event will focus on how organizations can take the next step by becoming active participants in open source communities and develop deeper collaborations with other organizations.  Speakers will includes Jeffery Hammond from Forrester Research, Andrew Aiken from Olliance Group, Karen Copenhaver from Linux Foundation, Mike Milinkovich from Eclipse, case studies from Ericsson and Boeing and two panel sessions.

The ALM Connect Executive Day will take place Wednesday, March 27.  This event is more focused on the tools and process organizations need to implement to respond to the changing software delivery landscape.  The ALM Connect conference goes into a lot of the technical details for the tools and process.  The Executive Day is focused on strategies organizations should be adopting to be successful.  Again, there is a great line-up of speakers including Lee Nackman for HP (for Eclipse history buffs Lee was one of the IBM executives that started Eclipse), Mik Kersten from Tasktop, Israel Gat from IDC, Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum and Jeffrey Hammond from Forrester Research.

Both events will take place at Boston Seaport World Trade Center, the same place as EclipseCon and ALM Connect. There is no cost to attend the events but you do need to request an invitation.  These events are intended for software and IT executives that want to learn more about open source and ALM.   Please note, attendees of these events do not get access to EclipseCon and ALM Connect.  If you want to attend the EclipseCon and ALM Connect you will also need to register and pay to attend.

I do hope people in the Eclipse community will invite the managers and executives within their organizations to attend these events.  We have a great line-up of speakers and the content is definitely relevant for many organizations.  I was going to make the title of this post ‘Bring your manager to EclipseCon’.  I do think it is a good opportunity to educate more people on open source and Eclipse.

New Donation Page

Over the next couple of days, many of you might notice a new donation page when you download Eclipse.  We are starting to roll-out this new page to encourage more of our user community to support the activities of the Eclipse Foundation.  The last couple of years we have had a very successful Friends of Eclipse program that has resulted in over 6000 donations from our community.  Our hope is the new page, shown while people are downloading Eclipse, will significantly increase the number of donations.

For those people that download Eclipse frequently, we will be using cookies so you won’t see the donation page all the time.

EclipseCon 2013 Keynote Lineup

We have announce our EclipseCon keynote speakers and I think we have a great lineup of speakers from Redmonk, Forrester, Twitter, GitHub, Nashorn and Vert.x.  This year we are going with 2 – 30 minute keynote speakers each morning, so we have double the number of speakers.

On Tuesday, the keynotes will be two of the best industry analysts covering the developer space.

Stephen O’Grady is the Co-Founder of Redmonk, a boutique analyst firm, that specializes in open source and the influence of developers in the software industry.  Stephen’s presentation ‘Developers are the New Kingmakers’ will look at how IT is becoming a developer-driven world.  Stephen has also recently published a book ‘The New Kingmakers‘ which attendees will have an opportunity to pick-up at EclipseCon.

Jeffrey Hammond from Forrester Research, the second keynote speaker is one of the smartest analyst I know in the ALM space. His talk “Moving Toward ALM 3.0′ is a great kick-off for the ALM Connect conference. Jeffrey also has a great vision on how a lot of the new tools and processes are modernizing the way we do application development.

On Wednesday, the two keynotes are from GitHub and Twitter talking about how they build software.  Zach Holman from GitHub did a great set of blog post on How GitHub Works. He is going to expand on these ideas during his talk at EclipseCon. Adam Messinger from Twitter will be talking about how Twitter builds software that scales to the requirements of running an application like Twitter.

Finally on Thursday, the two keynotes will introduce two new, and important, open source projects: Nashorn and Vert.x. Nashorn allows you to run JavaScript on the JVM and is a new Oracle-led project in the OpenJDK community.  Jim Laskey, Nashorn project leader, will introduce Nashorn and how it ties in with Java development.  JavaScript is gaining more and more popularity so having the ability to run JavaScript on the JVM opens a ton of opportunities for Java and JavaScript developers.

Vert.x is a new framework running on the JVM that make easy to write applications requiring large-scale concurrency.  In many ways, it is similar to Node.js in the JavaScript community but running on the JVM and supports many different languages.  As mobile computing and M2M applications become more prevalent technologies like Vert.x will be essential.  Therefore, we are lucky to have Tim Fox, Vert.x project leader, doing a keynote on Vert.x.  As a side note, Tim and the Vert.x community has also recently made the decision to propose Vert.x as an Eclipse project, so this will be a great way to welcome Vert.x to the Eclipse community.

These keynotes will be a great way to kick-off each morning at EclipseCon.  I hope you can join us and take-in the entire conference agenda.

 

Deadline for Eclipse Community Award Nominations

Next week is the deadline to nominate an individual, project or product for an Eclipse Community Award.  We have a lot of great nominees already but I know there are many other individuals, projects and products that deserve to be recognized.

You can check out the current list of nominees:

• Top Committer
• Top Newcomer Evangelist
• Most Innovative New Feature or Project
• Most Open Project
• Best Application
• Best Developer Tool
• Best Developer Plugin
• Best Modeling Project

Deadline for nominations is January 24. As a reminder, you can nominate your own project or product, don’t be shy.