Life at Eclipse

I have been on the road this past week, with stops in New York and Zurich on my way to the Open Source Meets Business (english) conference in Nuremburg. OSMB is an interesting conference. I met a lot of interesting new folks and a few old friends that I hadn’t seen in quite a while.

Oh, and Stephen, whatever you have, it’s contagious. After a perfect flight from Frankfurt to Toronto, I’ve landed in a complete mess. So far it looks like I will only be home five hours late Of course, this always happens when I actually need to be home on time. The bantam hockey team I coach is on the ice at 7pm, and it looks like I will miss the game by about three hours.

As already reported by Ed Brill and others, this is, I think, truly high praise from Stephen O’Grady of RedMonk for the capabilities of Eclipse RCP:

Notes 8 client is, simply put, one of the nicer looking Eclipse RCP based clients I’ve seen to date, on par with what Microsoft is delivering in its quite attractive new Office release.

A question that I have heard several times over the past couple of months is along the lines of “…if I use RCP, will my application look like the Eclipse Java IDE?” The answer is clearly no, as the new products from Lotus are demonstrating. The team there have spent a lot of time and effort demonstrating that you can build very cool-looking applications with RCP.

As I mentioned on Monday, incubating projects now have the ability to start developing in parallel with the IP review and approval process. That’s clearly good news for all those new projects eager to get a fast start once they’ve been created.

In the same Board meeting where this new IP Policy was approved, there was also an important new directive from the Board to all Eclipse projects. You can see the resolution in full on our governance page. But basically there are three key points:

1. Projects need to conform to a standard template for their website look-and-feel. This has been a sore point with our user community for quite a while, as there is a wide range of looks and quality of the various project sites. Hopefully bringing some order to this will help our community navigate our site.
2. Each project which is in the incubation stage must use the incubation logo and clearly identify their website and downloads as such. (On a related note, some have expressed unhappiness with the incubator logo, so we may be having another design contest.)
3. Projects need to start using the project-info.xml files to keep the community up-to-date on their status and activities.

So this is basically taking some stuff that the EMO has been encouraging projects to do and making it Board-supported policy.

Obviously implementing these requirements is going to take some time. Bjorn will be letting everyone know what the roll out plan is.

So the big news in RCP-land this week is coming from Lotusphere, where there is much talk about Eclipse-based rich clients. Check out this screenshot gallery of the next version of Lotus Notes based on Eclipse RCP. This is an awesome demonstration of the ability of RCP to enable compelling UIs.

For those interested in learning more about Eclipse RCP, if you didn’t make Lotusphere don’t despair. EclipseCon 2007 is coming soon, with lots of content on OSGi and RCP.

I have some very good news for new projects at Eclipse. At the board meeting last week, an important revision to the Eclipse Intellectual Property Policy was approved. Under the new revision, projects which are in incubation — and which are clearly marking their webpages and downloads as such — can now start to have their IP submissions approved while they are working on the code, rather than waiting for prior approval.

So how does this work? All projects still have to submit contribution questionnaires. The difference is that once a CQ has been reviewed for license compatibility, an incubating project will be authorized via IPzilla to check in the code to CVS and start working on it.

IP due diligence will need to be completed before the project can ship anything labeled as a release candidate or release.

Hopefully this will help us avoid past scenarios where new projects have had to wait for a long time for IP approvals in order to get started!