Life at Eclipse

The Orion team has announced their 1.0 release, a major milestone for this new tooling platform for the web, in the web. Or if you prefer, for the cloud, in the cloud.

For those who are not familiar with Orion, you may want to read my introductory blog post when the project first launched in 2011. PlanetOrion is another great source of information. But even better, go and try it out by downloading it, or setting up an account on orionhub.org.

Orion is a completely new open source tooling platform, which provides an open, extensible tooling platform and a set of re-usable components for building web tools which run in your browser.

Despite just releasing their 1.0 version, the Orion team has already seen some pretty interesting adoption. From the team’s post:

Orion has had some great adoption leading up to the 1.0 release like being included in Firefox as the editor for ScratchPad, the editor and the basis for Content Assist in Scripted, a platform for hosting an entire solution at Cloudfier, and numerous investigative demos from other projects such at Stardust and Xtext/Xtend.

So, congratulations to the Orion team! I’m already looking forward to the 2.0 release in a few months.

I am very happy to welcome Google as the newest Strategic Member of the Eclipse Foundation. This is important, and exciting news for the Eclipse community. Google will be joining CA Technologies, IBM, Oracle and SAP as the backbone of the Eclipse Foundation’s funding, as each of these companies are providing $250,000 per year for our operations. They will be joining Actuate, Bredex, EclipseSource, itemis, OBEO, and Talend as Strategic Members on the Board.

Google has long been a very large user, adopter and contributor to Eclipse. The Eclipse tooling platform has been an important part of Android’s success in the mobile marketplace, as well as providing the tooling for other Google initiatives such as AppEngine, GWT, and Dart. Google has also contributed to CDT, and has both led and contributed significantly to the JGit and WindowBuilder projects.  By providing this additional funding, Google will be helping the Eclipse Foundation ensure that we have a great infrastructure and a great staff to support our community.

Please join me in welcoming Google’s generous support of the Eclipse Foundation!