Camping Season Coming Soon: Eclipse Indigo DemoCamps

It is that time of year to start thinking about organizing an Eclipse DemoCamp.  Each year we run a series of DemoCamps to highlight the June release train, so we are now getting ready for the Indigo DemoCamps.

Organizing a DemoCamp is really simple: 1) Find a location that can hold up to 50 people and ideally serves refreshments and food, 2) Set a date and add the DemoCamp to our wiki, 3) Find 4-6 people willing to demo what they are doing with Eclipse, 3) Promote the DemoCamp to your friends and local developer community, 4) On the day of the DemoCamp, have fun, meet lots of interesting people and learn lots, and 5) Enjoy the accolades for organizing a successful Eclipse community event.    If you work at a member company or are an Eclipse committer, the Eclipse Foundation will help pay for the refreshments and food.

We already have 20 DemoCamps being organized but I would like to see a lot more, so please consider organizing one in your city.   If you are in Germany, there are already 9 DemoCamps organized, so the challenge will be to find a new city.  Germans seem to love their DemoCamps!

Give Us Your Feedback by Participating in the Eclipse Community Survey

Eclipse has a large community of developers working in all types of industries, using different languages and creating different types of applications and software.   Once a year we try to get a snapshot of what these developers are doing and using with Eclipse.   These snapshots allow us to understand the trends that occurring in the Eclipse community.

The 2011 edition of the Eclipse Community Survey is now open for participation.  I invite everyone to give us your feedback by participating in the survey.   The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete.  To thank those that participate, we will randomly select 5 people to win an Eclipse shirt (or other Eclipse SWAG) and a grand prize winner will receive a free pass to EclipseCon Europe 2011 or EclipseCon 2012.

The survey will close on May 13 at 5pmET.  We will publish the results in early June.

Thanks in advanced to all who participate.

Provide input into the upcoming Eclipse survey

Each year we do a survey of the Eclipse community.   The goal is to  better understand of how people are using Eclipse and in what type of environment.    This will be the fourth year we have run the survey so we also have an opportunity to track trends, like what are the more popular operating systems for developers or popular code management systems.

I like to keep the survey to around 30 questions, so each year we delete and add new questions.   This year I plan to add a question about modeling.  Something like the following:

Do you use Eclipse Modeling Technology?

–  I integrate Eclipse modeling technology into applications for external use  (ISV)
–  I integrate Eclipse modeling technology into applications for internal use in my organization
– I use Eclipse modeling technology for academic and research projects
– I am a committer on one of the Eclipse modeling projects
– I don’t use Eclipse modeling technology
– Don’t know
– Other  (please specify)

If you use Eclipse modeling technology, what best characterizes your application?  (Choose as many that are applicable)

– Manage the data model for my application.
– Business process management  (BPM)
– Enterprise architecture understanding
– Graphical representations using the modeling technology
– Other  (Please specify)

Any feedback on this question from the Eclipse modeling community would be appreciated.

 

A draft of the survey is available. Feel free to fill-out the survey but your answers will be deleted before we launch the official survey.  If you have any suggestions for new questions, missing options or general editorial comments, please let me know via comments here or e-mail (ian at eclipse dot org)

We plan to open the official survey in mid-April.

Drag and Drop Install is Coming to Eclipse

For the Indigo release, our goal is to make it a LOT easier to install products using the Marketplace Client (MPC).  One of the key new features in the MPC Indigo release will be support for drag and drop install.  In the recent M6 release, you can test out this new feature.  We have created a special page in Marketplace to allow you to drag from the install icon to a running instance of Eclipse Indigo M6 (reminder MPC is not in the Classic package).

Alternatively try to load EGit directly from the icon below.

I think this is going to be a pretty sweet feature for the Eclipse ecosystem.  Feel free to provide feedback/bugs to the MPC forum or bugzilla.