Each year, there are a number of interesting trends that seem to emerge from the results. Here are some highlights from the 2013 survey:

1. Git continues to take-over. The adoption of Git as a developers primary source code management system continues to move forward and at the expense of Subversion. Interestingly, Subversion continues to be the #1 SCM but just barely. If you combine Git and GitHub usage, Subversion leads by only 1.5% points. Next year I am sure Git and GitHub will be #1.

2. Decline of Ant usage. For Build and Release Management tools, there was a significant drop in the usage of Ant. Only 38.8% on the respondents claim to use Ant compared to 50.8% in 2012.

3. Regional differences for cloud computing. This year we had a large number of respondents from Germany. This allowed us to identify some regional differences in the responses. One of the most significant diffrences were plans for cloud computing. Overall, 47% of  respondents had no plans for deploying applications to the cloud, compared to 59.5% in Germany. For those that were deploying applicaitons to the cloud, Germans top preference was to deploy to a private cloud (35%) compared to the overall respondents preference of deploying to Amazon (30.8%).

4. Perceptions of Web-based IDE. For the first time this year we asked about people’s experiences with web-based IDEs. Projects like Orion are investing and innovating in this new style of IDE so I thought it would be interesting to understand current perceptions. A large majority (72%) stated they had no interest in a web-based IDE or needed more information to form an opinion. It is certainly early days for web-based IDEs but I think these results show that there is a lot of education and evangelism needed to change developer’s perception of web-based IDEs.

5. Most respected companies in open source. This year we asked respondents to list which companies they respected for their open source contribution and participation.  This was a write-in question so respondents could write-in multiple company names and were not picking from a list.

The top 3 most respected companies for their open source contributions and participation are Google, RedHat/JBoss and IBM. Congratulations to all 3 companies, a well deserved recognition for the support they provide to the open source community.

6. Adoption of new Eclipse releases. For the first time this year there was a noticeable decrease in the adoption of the latest Eclipse release, Eclipse 4.2. In past survey results, 75%+ of the respondents would report they were using the most recent release of Eclipse, for example in 2012 76.9% were using Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo). This year only 56% reported to be using Eclipse 4.2 (Juno) and an additional 12.9% using Eclipse 3.8.  The slow down in adoption is most likely the result of the performance issues found in Eclipse 4.2.

At the same time, there was a significant drop in the overall satisfaction with Eclipse. Respondents indicating they were very satisfied or satisfied dropped from 90% in 2012 to 81% in 2013.  Not very good news and hopefully something that will be addressed as the Eclipse 4.x platform continues to mature.

Thank you to everyone that participated in the survey. We certainly appreciate you taking the time to provide your feedback.

It is time to announce the dates and location for EclipseCon NA 2014. We will be hosting EclipseCon NA 2014 at the Hyatt Regency in Burlingame, CA on March 17-20, 2014. Burlingame is very close to the San Francisco airport so it will be very convenient to San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. For those astute readers will also recognize the Hyatt Regency as the location for EclipseCon 2005, so we are excited to return to this location and the West coast.

The call for papers will be out later this summer. For now remember the EclipseCon Europe call for papers is now looking for great session ideas.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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