Life at Eclipse

So I am currently at the Hyatt Regency Burlingame — fondly remembered as the site of our most recent EclipseCon — for the Zend/PHP conference. This is my third conference in eight days. London, Paris and San Francisco in eight days. Remind me to never do that again.

But the great thing is that no matter where I go, Eclipse is present in a big way.

• At the Symbian Smartphone show, Symbian and Nokia both made Eclipse-related announcements. Symbian announced that they were joining the Foundation, and that they will be making a significant on-going contribution to the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) project.

  Nokia announced its new Carbide product family of C/C++ development tools, based on CDT. This is Nokia’s foray into Eclipse-based C/C++ tools to complement their previously announced efforts in mobile Java (J2ME).

  Also at the show, I got a demo of Wirelexsoft‘s visual programming tools for mobile applications. It is amazing to me what a small dedicated team can build on top of Eclipse in short order. This tool looks really powerful.

• Next stop was the OSGi World Congress where I was on a panel and gave a keynote. This was a smaller, more intimate conference. Lots of time and space to chat with people. A few notables I had an opportunity to meet were Richard Hall and Enrique Rodriguez from the Felix project, and Christer Larsson from Knoplerfish (thanks for the T-shirt!)

  Here, the Eclipse Foundation got to do its own announce that we’re ready with OSGi R4, and that the Equinox project was being “promoted” to become part of the Eclipse project. The Eclipse runtime is entirely based on the OSGi spec. I consider the OSGi and Eclipse relationship a great example of open source and open standards working well together. Although there is strong competition between multiple open source and commercial implementations, I really found the OSGi community open and friendly to a relative newcomer.

• Today’s stop is at the Zend/PHP conference, where Zend announced that they are joining Eclipse as a Strategic Developer. They are going to be leading a project to implement PHP development tools at Eclipse. I think I said in my first press interview upon joining Eclipse that this community is about more languages and platforms than Java. Having Zend come to build PHP tools at Eclipse is a big step in that direction.

After a redeye home this evening, I don’t travel for almost ten days 😉

My goodness Ed Burnette is fast 🙂 .

Yes, as mentioned by Ed, I really am very pleased that Ward has decided to join the staff of the Eclipse Foundation. It’s really great to have him. I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with Ward at several points in the past, and I’ve always found him to be a truly rare bird: someone who is both brilliant but also blessed with a warm and engaging personality. I couldn’t imagine someone I would rather be working with.

For those who are interested, here is the text of the email I sent to the Eclipse committer community earlier today:

I am very pleased to announce that Ward Cunningham is joining the staff of the Eclipse Foundation.

To date, the efforts of the Eclipse Foundation in support of the committer community have been primarily around providing infrastructure and process. However, a high functioning committer community is about more than just sharing servers and following a common process. A high functioning committer community is about collaboration and cooperation between the project silos. Although the Councils do an admirable job of co-ordinating the activities of the many Eclipse projects, what is needed is a culture of collaboration and cooperation. This is especially true today, as Eclipse grows rapidly with new projects and new committers.

To help cultivate this committer culture, I am pleased to announce that Ward Cunningham is joining the Eclipse Foundation as Director, Committer Community Development. Ward’s track record of invention in areas such as wikis, patterns and agile development are known worldwide. His current interests in open source and developing communities of developers are a perfect match for the work we need to do at Eclipse. Ward will lead the effort to create a more cohesive Eclipse committer community by working with developers in order to enhance Eclipse as “the place to be”.