Each year at EclipseCon we announce the winners of the Eclipse Community Awards.  The last 4 years we have recognized worthy individuals and products for their contribution to the Eclipse community.

This year I’d like to take a fresh look at the Eclipse awards and see if we can/should revamp the categories.   Are there other categories we should introduce to acknowledge participation in the community?

As a reminder the individual categories from last year were:

• Top Ambassador
• Top Committer
• Top Contributor
• Top Newcomer Evangelist

And the product/technology categories were:

• Best Developer Tool (Commercial and Open Source)
• Best RCP Application (Commercial and Open Source)
• Best Equinox Based Application (Commercial and Open Source)

Some ideas for new categories:

• Most open Eclipse project  – we would need to come up with a scoring metric
• Most popular Eclipse project  – select this based on voting
• Most popular commercial product – select based on voting  (the existing awards are selected by a judging panel)
• Most prolific blogger  – measured by posting on PlanetEclipse
• Most active committer/contributor – select based on number of bugzillas open/closed?

If we introduce new categories we might drop some of the existing ones, for instance Top Ambassador.

I am looking for ideas and feedback.   We can just go with what we did in the past but I think it is important to keep things fresh.

Microsoft announced today they have purchased the Teamprise technology from SourceGear, products that allow Eclipse developers to connect to the MS Team Foundation Server (TFS).   The Teamprise clients will be bundle into Visual Studio 2010, which appears to be set for launch in March 2010.

If I am not mistaken, this will be the first time Microsoft will be shipping a commercial product that is made up of Eclipse plugins.   Microsoft has previously sponsored open source plugins for Eclipse but nothing in their core products.  This is a great news and  it reflects the fact a lot of big development shops are using Eclipse and Visual Studio.   It also shows MS is listening to their customers and are taking open source interoperability very seriously.

This is also more than just tapping into the Eclipse user community but accessing the extended Eclipse ecosystem.  As stated in the press release:

…within Eclipse and Eclipse-based integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Rational Application Developer, JBoss, BEA Workshop and Adobe Flex Builder.

With one acquisition, MS TFS has gained interoperability with IBM, Abode, JBoss, Oracle (BEA) plus many others.  What a great example of the power of Eclipse.

I hope the next step for MS is to become a member of the Eclipse Foundation.  This would really make them a first-class member of the Eclipse community.

Developers in Toronto have a great opportunity to participate in back-to-back Eclipse events: Eclipse Modeling and EclipseRT Day on November 18 & 19.    Think of it as a mini-EclipseCon but with polite Canadians saying ‘eh’, ‘pop’ and ‘about’.

Modeling and Eclipse runtime technology (including OSGi and Equinox) are two of the most innovative areas in the Eclipse community.   Speaking at this event will be some of the project leaders and committers for these Eclipse projects.  There will even be some of the e4 committers talking about the next generation of Eclipse.

If you are an Eclipse user and live near Toronto, you should seriously consider attending.   Even if you live outside of Toronto, two days of free Eclipse related session in one place is a great opportunity to learn more about Eclipse technology.

There is no fee to attend but you need to pre-register via e-mail.  You can pre-register for both days or you can also register for just the EclipseRT Day or the Modeling Day.

This week the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is celebrating its 10th birthday at their ApacheCon conference.  ASF has been a pioneer and leader in the open source community.  When the Eclipse Foundation was first created, ASF was a source and inspiration for many of the Foundation’s principles (transparency, meritocracy) and structures (PMC, committers).  I continue to have a tremendous amount of respect for ASF’s individual-centric approach towards open source development and the fact they operate such a large influential organization with volunteers.   They are clearly an important force in the greater open source community.

This week we have added an Apache birthday greeting to the eclipse.org banner.  I hope you will join me in ‘raising a glass’ to wish Apache Happy 10th birthday.

Each year we ask the attendees of Eclipse Summit Europe some questions about themselves.   It gives us some insight into who is actually attending the conference.   Here are some of the results.

1. Where do people live?

Not surprisingly, a lot of the ESE attendees are from Germany; in total 57% of the attendees resides in Germany but 24 other countries are represented.  In addition to Germany France, Switzerland, US, Canada, Netherlands and Austria have more than 10 attendees at ESE.

2.  Years of experience using Eclipse?

Over 60% of the ESE attendees have been using Eclipse for more than 3 years.   Not terribly surprising considering the maturity of Eclipse.

3. How does your company use Eclipse?

Just over half (51%) of attendees were building internal or commercial applications based on Eclipse.  From talking to people, I know lots of people are using Eclipse modeling, RCP, Equinox and other Eclipse technology for building their applications.

4. What is your role in your company?

No great surprise that the ESE attendees are very technical, 67% identified themselves as being a developer or architect.

5. What Eclipse projects are you using?

Europeans love their models and EMF is their choice of technology.  EMF was a close second to JDT as being the most popular project.   Equinox and RCP also had very strong use amongst the ESE attendees.

One thing I really enjoy about ESE is the people. I look forward to seeing everyone again next year.

Earlier this year we started a project to re-create Eclipse Plugin Central.  Thanks to the hard work of Nathan Gervais, we are getting very close to making Eclipse Marketplace a reality.  In late September, we rolled out a beta of the site and now we would like to get even more feedback from the Eclipse community.

Besides the new design, layout and hosting on a new Drupal content management system there are some new ‘features’ that I’d like to highlight.

1. We have replaced the voting of EPIC with a ‘Favourite’ feature.   Users can now ‘favourite the solutions they use or want to track.  The solutions that have been favourited by the most people will show-up in a ‘Top Favourites’ category.   You can also see what other people have selected as their favourites.  Users must also be logged-in to favourite a solution, so no more anonymous voting.  Good news is that you can login using an existing Eclipse bugzilla account.

2. We have tried to make navigation much easier.  A product can exist in multiple categories, tags are now available for each solution page and [soon to come] user tagging will be enabled.

3. We are using Apache Solr for the search engine.  The hope is that this will greatly improve the search capability.

4. p2 has created a new opportunity for Marketplace to make it easier for end-user to install new plugins.  We are encouraging all solution provides to publish their update site in their Marketplace listing.

We have also add the ability for individuals to create their own p2 repository that is based on their favourite list.   Users can load their Maretplace repo url into Eclipse and then easily keep up to date on the plugins use.  Each individual Maretplace repo can also be shared so you can invite others to use what you have selected.   For instance here is my repo for my favourites.

Things we still need to add include:

- more work on the home page so it is easier to find the interesting stuff.

- we want to publish an api to the content so other people can use the Maretplace data.

- advanced search still needs a bit of work in terms of layout and usability.

- we need to encourage the solution providers to add their update sites.

- metrics on each solution

Our goal is to make this live by the end of this year.  To make this happen we really need your feedback and testing.  Give it a try, select some favourites, add new content, let us know what you think at this bugzilla entry.

A word of caution, this is all TEST data so any new data will be deleted before we go live.  Thanks for the testing.

JetBrains just announced an open source edition of their popular IntelliJ IDE, under the Apache 2.0 license.  As many might know, IntelliJ was one of the last IDE’s that actually cost money.  It appears they have adopted an open source plus commerical value add strategy, similar to many companies in the Eclipse ecosystem.

This announcement is pretty surprising; at least to me.   It will certainly make it easier to get IntelliJ and hence competitive to Eclipse IDE.  However, it might open up opportunities for the two communities to collaborate?  What I would love to see is IntelliJ provide great support for Equinox and OSGi; more and better tools make the world a better place. 

Congrats to the JetBrains team for making the big leap.  I am positive your decision to go open source will pay off for you in the long-term.

Kirk Knoernschild from Burton Group is asking for inut  to an OSGi Survey.  Last year Kirk did a similar survey and the results we pretty interesting.   As Kirk mentioned, not exactly a scientific survey but since OSGi seems to be gaining momentum it will be interesting to compare results.

The survey is 10 short questions, so it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to complete, so why not do it now.

Last week I attended the CTIA conference; the USA mobile phone industry conference.  At the conference, Eclipse announced that Sony Ericsson and Ericsson had joined our Pulsar initiative.  I also spent the week talking to developers and learning more about the mobile developer community.   Mobile development is definitely on the upswing, so I think it is an interesting opportunity for the Eclipse community.

Some thoughts about the conference:

• Android has lots of momentum.  Most of the big announcements at the show were about new Android based handsets.  Motorola hosted their MotoDev Summit which was predominately Android related technical content.  Lots of developers seemed to think Android is an easier platform to create and deploy apps, at least when compared to Apple iPhone.  However, the show is US centric, so Symbian really didn’t have a big presence.
• Eclipse seems to be the de-facto IDE for companies building tools for mobile developers.  However it is always nice to make new discoveries of Eclipse based tools.  For instance, Samsung has integrated the WTP Javascript editor for building mobile widgets for Samsung phones.   Mobile Sorcery has Eclipse plugins for their cross platform framework.
• Platform fragmentation has been and continues to be a big issue for mobile developers.   Lots of people are looking to the ‘mobile web’ to help solve some of the issues; frameworks like Bondi, PhoneGap, RIM’s Widget SDK and others seem to have potential.   However the native vs ‘web’ discussions seem to be a topic of hot debate.  I wonder if better tools would help?   It still feels like the developer tools are immature in this market, so I see an opportunity for Pulsar and other potential solutions.

The mobile developer space is obviously an interesting area to watch.  Over time I can see enterprise development and mobile development coming closer together.    I see Eclipse being well positioned to be a dominant tools platform in this market.

This past week I had the opportunity to interview both keynote speakers for the upcoming Eclipse Summit Europe conference.  My goal was to find out a bit more about their upcoming presentations.  The interviews are now available as podcasts on Eclipse Live.

Don Syme works at MS Research in Cambridge, UK and is the creator of F#.   During our discussion Don talks about why functional programming languages are important and the role they are playing in the Web 2.0 era.   It is obvious Don has a big-brain in the area of computer languages, so it should be an interesting geek-out keynote.

Tony Bailetti is a professor at Carleton University here in Ottawa.   I’ve know Tony since I went to school at Carleton and his passion for the commercialization of technology is infectious.  In the podcast, Tony talks about the origins of the Open Source Maturity Model, something we use a lot at the Eclipse Foundation, and the importance of ecosystems.

I’m looking forward to both keynotes.  Both speakers are experts in their areas and passionate about their topcis.  Should be good…