New Lower Prices for EclipseCon NA

One of our goals for EclipseCon NA 2013 is to make it accessible to more people. Over the past number of years we have heard from individuals and companies that would have like to attend but the registration price was too high. Therefore, I am thrilled that this year we have been able to reduce the early registration price (before Dec. 31) to just $800. Last year the price was $1345, so we have dropped this price 40%!

We have also introduced a non-corporate price for individuals who are paying to attend out of their own pocket. If you can’t convince your company to pay, you can purchase an all-access badge for just $500. We hope this will allow even more individuals to attend. There is a limited number of passes available at the non-corporate prices, so register early.

As in past years, we are also looking for a number of student volunteers and we have a student price of just $400.

To reduce the prices we have had to make some changes to the conference. Returning attendees will notice that breakfast will no longer be served and there won’t be a dinner reception on Wednesday evening. There are lots of restaurants close to the hotel so attendees will have an opportunity to explore the area. We have also reduced the member/alumni discount to $100 (from $250) and decreased the rate for group discounts.

Registration is now open for EclipseCon NA 2013. I hope a lot more people are able to take advantage of the lower prices and attend EclipseCon NA. As a reminder, the conference call for papers is now open. We want to hear from everyone that has an interesting speaking proposal.

Eclipse Finance Day in Zurich

We are very pleased to announce the Eclipse Finance Day in Zurich on October 16, 2012.  Eclipse is used by some major financial institutions so this event is a great opportunity for individuals working in the finance industry to share best practices and network with their peers.  We have speakers from UBS, Credit Suisse, PostFinance, Swiss Mobiliar, Swiss Post, Basler and other organizations. We also have Eclipse experts Ed Merks, Christian Campo and Benjamin Muskalla speaking.  The agenda is really pretty amazing.

UBS is hosting the day long event at their office in Zurich.  There is no cost to attend but you do need to pre-register.  If you work in the finance industry, use Eclipse and live reasonably close to Zurich, I’d encourage you to attend.

Program Comittee for EclipseCon NA 2013

We are starting to gear up for EclipseCon 2013 in Boston.   The first order of business is to form a program committee.  Therefore I am very please to announce John Arthorne has agreed to be the Program Chair.  Joining John on the committee will be:

• Doug Schaefer (past chair)
• Cedric Brun
• Gunnar Wagenknecht
• Ian Bull
• Kevin Sawicki
• Lars Vogel
• Sven Efftinge

Thank you to all these people for volunteering their time to help make EclipseCon another great conference.  We plan to have the call for papers out in mid to late September.

Learning about M2M

Machine-2-Machine (M2M) or the Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology area and industry that is growing very quickly, has a lot of great potential but I am not sure is understood very well by the software industry.  We are lucking to have at Eclipse a very active M2M Industry Working Group and 2, soon to be 3, Eclipse open source projects (Paho, Koneki).

One goal of the M2M Industry Working Group is to educate the industry and the Eclipse community on what is M2M and how the Eclipse projects will help developers build amazing M2M applications.  Therefore, I am happy to announce a series of four webinars that will 1) introduce people to M2M, 2) explore the architecture of an M2M application, 3) introduce MQTT, a message protocol ideally suited for M2M and 4) demostrate how Lua is great for building M2M applications.

The webinars will happen in September and October.  They are free to attend but you need to pre-register.

Eclipse Finance Day in Zurich: Coming Soon

We are planning to hold an Eclipse Finance Day in Zurich Switzerland on October 16, 2012. The Finance industry is a huge user and adopter of Eclipse, so hosting an Eclipse Day is a great opportunity to learn from your industry peers and discover what else is possible with Eclipse. We are also very lucky to have UBS host the event at their offices in Zurich.

In the past there has been a number of very successful Eclipse Banking Days. A key to their success has been the great speakers we had from the banking and finance industry. Therefore, we would like to invite people working in the finance industry to submit a speaking proposal to present at the Eclipse Finance Day. If you are working in the finance industry and are doing some interesting development with Eclipse, please send us your ideas. More details are available in the call for papers. The deadline to submit ideas is August 15.

Registration for the Eclipse Finance Day will start in early September.

Comments and Suggestions from the Eclipse Survey

At the end of the Eclipse Community Survey we ask for general comments and suggestions about Eclipse and the Eclipse Foundation. I decided to respond and highlight some of them.

I want to know about e4 more detail. But I feel those information don’t meet my expectation. So please give me more information in public space. Thanks for your great efforts every day.

A good source of information about Eclipse 4 is the wiki and the Eclipse 4 home page.  I do appreciate more documentation is always needed. 

Great product.

Keep up the great work

Thank you and we will.

Document it better, i will eagerly contribute.

Please do start contributing documentation.  I’d suggest you post an e-mail to the project mailing list, introduce yourself and let them know what you want to document.

The first thing I do when installing a fresh copy of Eclipse is to grab all the plugins that I use. The integrated Eclipse marketplace is helpful, but only lets me install one plugin at a time. Some sort of “shopping cart” would be useful so that I could select multiple plugins though the marketplace and install them all simultaneously.

You can actually do this today with the Marketplace Client.  After you select the first plugin, just hit the back button and select additional plugins.

Eclipse was the first IDE I ever used for serious software development. It sure has its issues, but still remains my first choice as other IDEs keep me sighing for their shortcomings.

Please keep up the good work, and please DO more promotion for the Eclipse 4.x line.

I only found out this week it is actually already in a quite usable state.

As of the upcoming Juno release, Eclipse 4.2 will be the mainstream platform so it will get a lot of usage and promotion.  Glad to hear you are finding it stable.

I’m trying to learn as fast as I can. Can I just download the knowledge directly into my brain? Is there a plugin for this?

I believe some people are working on this plugin but it is still in alpha.

I would like an easier way to create a plugin to support a DSL language that I am developing.

I hope you have looked at Xtext?

EclipseCon should be back in Santa Clara!!!

Sorry but next year it is going to be in Boston.  There are a lot of people that like having it on the east coast.  I do expect we will go back to the San Francisco area in future years.

I’m a Eclipse UI developer . I was picked up by college in India 7 yrs back and since then I have developed many successful desktop application. I want to visit Eclipse con in Europe but I find it very expensive. My suggestion to Eclipse foundation is to have more of such conferences around UK where its easy to go. Demo camps are only for 1 hr and they do not cover everything.

It would be great to have more EclipseCon conferences in different locations.  However, the time required to organize these conferences only makes it practical to do 2 each year.  Sorry.

Eclipse has been my favourite IDE for years, but the plugins EGit and CDT need to be reviewed and edited. EGit misses some functions, like commits with –no-ff. I’d rather use the GitExtensions instead. The combination of CDT and gcc on Mac OS X (10.6) is too buggy to be usable, so I use Visual Studio instead for debugging purposes.

I know both projects appreciate feedback via bugzilla and are doing their best to improve.

The EMF is great and enables us to implement all model stuff we need.

I hope you take the opportunity to let the EMF project team know.

sometimes it is difficult to decide which plugins are useful, work as promised, and maintained. maybe a (loose) certification could help.

Eclipse Marketplace is setup to allow for comments, favorites and popularity of installs.   In a sense I hope the ‘crowd-sourcing’ aspect of Marketplace help people find useful plugins.

Eclipse is a piece of shit.

No comment stream would be complete without a troll.

Please add a better Maven integration and please, please, please focus more on JDT, if JDT isn’t the best way to develop Java applications, Eclipse

I agree focus on JDT is important and we are always looking for help!!  Contributors are welcome!

Several Eclipse projects do not make good use of the services offered by eclipse.org.  Wikis, downloads, forums, finding svn or git.  It is often challenging to find project info as the project pages are stale, incomplete, or just plain wrong.  Much of the infrastructure seems like abandonware to me.  While I like software produced by the Eclipse project, Eclipse project hosting leaves a lot to be desired.

I tend to agree some of the Eclipse projects need to do better on their web sites.  We need to get better here.

Eclipse needs to make sure to stay relevant in the future. The Foundation needs to be more active in recruiting new projects, esp. in “hot” areas like cloud computing and mobile. Something like Cloud Foundry would have been great for Eclipse… To make this happen, maybe the focus needs to be shifted away a bit from the classical eclipse (runtime) technologies. Having those technologies at Eclipse can bring again more lifeblood into Eclipse’ core technologies. Orion can just be a first step.

I certainly agree. Orion is a great start for web development.  In the mobile space, most of the mobile platforms have Eclipse tools (exception is Apple).  We do continue to encourage and recruit new projects.   Anyone should feel free to contact us if you have an idea for a new project.

Thank you again to everyone who completed the survey and left some feedback.  I couldn’t respond to all but I did read them.  All the comments are available in the raw data files [ods] [xls].

Eclipse Community Survey Result for 2012

Each year we survey the Eclipse community to gather some insight into what developers are doing with Eclipse and open source.  We have published the results and the detailed data is available [xls] [ods].  Embedded version of the report is at the end of this post.

Each year there are always some key trends shown in the results [2011 results].   Here are some insights that appeared for me:

1. Git Momentum Continues to Grow

Git definitely has the momentum in the source code management market.  Git/Github usage increased from 13% (2011) to 27% (2012).  Subversion continues to decline but is still the most popular.

For the first time this year we broke out Git and Github.  I was surprised to see the vast majority of people specify Git (23%) and only 4.5% specify GitHub.  This seems to show a lot of internal Git usage.   Potentially a great opportunity for tool providers.

2. Maven Usage Accelerating

Maven usage increased from 31% (2011) to 42% (2012).   This might be a reflection on better integration with Eclipse and Maven.  If so, kudos to the m2eclipse project team and Tycho.

3. Spring and EJBs continue to be popular server frameworks.  Equinox and OSGi increasing too.

Both Spring and EJBs continue to be the most popular frameworks for people doing server side development.  Spring continues to be the most popular but EJBs gain some ground in 2012.

It was great to see Equinox and OSGi runtimes almost double their usage from 6.8% (2011) to 12.3% (2012)

4. Mobile computing = Android + iOS

Not surprisingly, mobile computing is dominated by Android and iOS.  More people have deployed mobile applications, 43% have developed internal or external applications, compared to 35% in 2011.

Android and Apple iOS continue to dominate as the key platforms.   It is a bit surprising that more developers are not using cross platform frameworks.  60% claim to use only the Mobile OS SDK.  jQuery Mobile (28.6%) and PhoneGap (17.9%) are the most popular mobile frameworks.

5. What motivates a developer?

This year we asked some questions to explore what motivates a developer to participate in open source and spend their free time building applications

Motivation to participate in  open source projects seems to be driven by 1) sense of responsibility – 54% stated they participate to ‘give back and support’ and 36% due to their belief in the FOSS ethos, 2) learning – 36% claim it is a great way to learn new technologies, and 3) improving the project – 33% claim they participate due to a needed feature or bug fix.    Somewhat surprisingly only 11% claimed it was due to being paid to contribute and 6% was an effective way to promote consulting business.

We also asked how many developers build software/applications in their free time, outside of work.  I was a bit surprised that 84% claimed to spend some amount of personal time developing software.  The key reason is to learn new technologies, 74% answered they ‘enjoy programming and learning new technologies’ and 71% ‘keep my skills sharp’.   An important lesson for anyone in the software industry that is targeting developers: Make it easy for developer to learn your technology.

6. Corporate policies towards open source becoming more positive

Each year we ask what is the corporate policy towards open source participation.  It is nice to see we are seeing movement towards more positive policies towards contributions and participation.  61% reported their corporate policies allowed them to actively participate in open source projects compared to 58% in 2011.  We definitely need to get more companies to allow active participation but at least we are moving in the right direction.

Thank you to everyone that participate in the survey.  I always enjoy seeing the results.  Please feel free to leave a comment on what you find interesting in the results.

Eclipse survey 2012 report [final]

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