Life at Eclipse

The process of electing the 2008 board of director slots has begun.

As of this moment, there will be four elected committer representatives and four elected add-in provider representatives on next year’s board. However, under our Bylaws, the final determination will be made based on the total number of strategic members as of the date the membership meeting. That means that five of each is definitely a possibility.

I would like to strongly encourage community members to get involved in this election process. If you talk to anyone who has had the experience of being on the Eclipse board, they will tell you that it has been a great experience, both personally and professionally.

The terms of office are from April 1, 2008 to March 31, 2009.

Here are the key dates:

1. January 7, 2008: Nominations open. Nominations are to be sent as an email to emo (at) eclipse.org, with the subject “Add-In Provider Nomination” or “Committer Nomination”. As soon as possible after an individual is nominated, the Foundation will contact the nominee to confirm their willingness to participate in the election and to serve as a add-in provider representative if elected.
2. January 25, 2008: Nominations close. The list of nominees and their html pages will be available on the website as soon as possible thereafter.
3. January 29, 2008: List of nominees published on our website. Each nominee will be provided with an HTML template which outlines their background and vision for Eclipse as they are nominated. If the nominee does not have an HTML editor handy, plain text submissions for formatting by the EMO staff will be accepted via email. Content must be submitted to the Eclipse Foundation via email no later than Thursday, January 31st.
4. February 4, 2008: List of nominees and their personal pages made available on our website. Discussion of the issues on the eclipse.foundation newsgroup will be encouraged.
5. February 25, 2008: Voting begins.
6. March 7, 2008: Voting ends at 3:00pm Eastern time.
7. March 17, 2008: New representatives announced at the Membership Meeting at EclipseCon 2008 in Santa Clara, California

I just received one of those standard project announcements from Anne Jacko, but in it was something which really caught my eye:

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EMFT Project Announcement

The EMFT project would like to announcement the creation of a new component, EMF4NET. The goal of EMF4Net is to enhance the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) with a code generation facility for the .Net platform. EMF4Net will allow the generation of C# code from Ecore models in the same way that EMF generates Java code.

Neither Ecore nor the EMF code generation facility are limited to Java but provide the ability to generate code for other object-oriented languages. However, the generation of non-Java code alone does not make that code as useful as the Java code generated by EMF, because EMF’s core runtime is missing in the non Java languages. Therefore EMF4Net tries to provide a translation of the EMF core runtime for the .Net platform.

All votes for the creation of the component were +1; see http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/emft-dev/msg00215.html

The proposal is here: http://wiki.eclipse.org/EMF4Net_Proposal

We will be adding Reinhold Bihler, Deyan Rizov, and Manfred Bottger as EMFT committers.

Ed Merks, EMF/EMFT Project Lead and Modeling PMC Lead
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Personally, I think it’s cool to see Eclipse projects add support for other platforms in addition to Eclipse.

I’m pretty sure that Higgins has some stuff targeting .NET, and Doug Schaefer occasionally threatens C# support in CDT, but I think that’s about it. Does anyone know of any other projects that I’m not aware of?

So the staff of your friendly neighbourhood Eclipse Foundation honoured U.S. Thanksgiving last week with an afternoon of bowling. (That would be 5-pin to those not from Canada.) It was sort of like an Eclipse DemoCamp for the athletically challenged.

Apparently my misspent youth was worth something after all. I wasted quite a bit of time in my early teens hanging out at Hampton Lanes in the west end of Ottawa bowling, playing pinball and Pong, and eating quite possibly the greasiest onion rings in the history of man.

But it all came to a great result when yours truly won the combined high score award: a broken down, second hand bowling trophy that Lynn found on eBay and covered with Eclipse stickers. Now proudly displayed in my office, ready to be challenged for again next year.

Thanks go to Lynn and Sharon for organizing a fun afternoon!

…EclipseCon 2008 Program Committee.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday looking through the EclipseCon talk submissions, and I would definitely not want to be in charge of selecting talks. There are simply too many good ones. An embarrassment of riches. A cornucopia of technical info.

230 long talk submissions
134 short talk submissions
108 tutorial submissions
17 Philippe Ombredanne proposals 🙂

Wow! Even allowing for some dups and some withdrawals, that is great showing by the Eclipse community. Thanks to everyone who took the time to provide a submission.

Although the quantity is impressive, the quality is even more so. I encourage you to take a look (and comment) for yourself, but right now I am very confident that EclipseCon 2008 is going to simply rock as a technical conference.

I hope to see you there!

So according to the website, Eclipse was elected as a representative on the Java Community Process SE/EE Executive Committee. Even better, it looks like we did quite well in the voting. There is certainly no shame in getting beaten by Google 🙂

I’m looking forward to participating on the EC. Like I said before, the future success of Eclipse is intimately tied to a vibrant, open and successful Java. I am sure that there will be no shortage of interesting topics to discuss over the next three years.

So thanks to all of those who voted for Eclipse. It was much appreciated. I hope we do the Java Community proud.