Life at Eclipse

So I’m here at OSCON and having a great time. (If anyone wants to get together here, please call my cell phone 613-220-3223).

During Tim O’Reilly’s keynote he talked about a bunch of cool technologies that he believes are shaping the future of the Web. One that he singled out was OpenFount. It’s an interesting toolset that seriously lowers the bar for building and deploying AJAX applications based on Google’s GWT toolkit.

The cool piece is that their tools (of course) are Eclipse-based. As Jon Udell has already blogged:

…Openfount extends the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), adding support for the S3 API, for XML and SOAP processing, and for cryptography. I’d known that GWT apps are written in Java and then translated into JavaScript, but hadn’t thought about the benefits of that arrangment. One is that you can use the Eclipse IDE, with its robust debugger, to develop your AJAX app.

In my role, I spend quite a bit of time following the various companies and products building on top of the Eclipse platform. That could probably become a full-time job if I let it. There is an enormous amount of energy in the Eclipse ecosystem.

But every once in a while, even I get impressed with the depth and breadth of the products and technologies being built on Eclipse. It really is pretty freakin’ cool.

Being a lazy sort, I use Google news alerts to look for stuff. Here is a sampling of three cool products being built on Eclipse that just came across the wire yesterday:

• In the design automation space, VaST announced its Eclipse-based CoMET6 product. Here’s what they said about why Eclipse was important to their product:
  

  CoMET6 features an Eclipse framework. Eclipse, with strategic developers like IBM, Intel, Nokia and Wind River, is quickly becoming the de facto industry standard development platform and framework for embedded system design tools. Through Eclipse, CoMET6 supports customer-developed and third-party Eclipse plug-ins, allowing tighter integrations with customer-specific design tools and flows.

• In this review of IBM DB2’s latest release, the new Eclipse-based SQL development environment is singled out as a major competitive advantage.
  

  On a whole, DB2 9 has really raised the bar for database development….who can go past the slick new Developer Workbench? With the workbench, IBM should be able to claw back some ground from developers who in the past may have looked past DB2 for a platform that was easier to develop on.

• Last but not least, Eclipse member company LogicLibrary announced an initiative to create a community reporting portal to “…to facilitate the rapid and mutual sharing of report designs and ideas in the fast-growing Logidex community.” The reports “…can be based on a variety of sources, including Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) from the Eclipse Foundation, Crystal and SQL queries.“

Ho hum. Design automation, database development and collaborative community reporting. Just another day in the Eclipse ecosystem.

Sometimes I wonder if I was German in a previous life. I certainly spend a lot of time there, and I always enjoy myself. Seriously, any country that firmly believes that beer and business mix is my kind of place.

Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to be in Germany for an Eclipse Stammtisch. Stammtisch is a great tradition in Germany where a group of people with a common interest regularly get together at a pub to chat over beers. (Of course, this happens in Canada as well, we’ve just never gone so far as to invent a word for it.) As I understand it, the tradition continues even today with local politics. The locals will get together with the town mayor and councillors to hash out the issues.

Ralph Mueller has been organizing a regular Stammtisch in and around Zwingenberg where he lives, and set one up for when I was there. It was a great opportunity to see some old acquaintances and make some new ones. There was also a very nice mix of committers, plug-in developers and supporters.

A lot of the conversation focused on the upcoming Eclipse Summit Europe, and how to best organize it. We had a lot of great ideas and even better, people volunteering to help. That’s probably my next trip to Germany, so I hope to see everyone there in October.

So to Sebastien, Alexander, Michael, Alexi, Hendrik and others: Prost!