Life at Eclipse

So I head for SFO in the wee hours of the morning and thought it would be worth jotting down a few thoughts and observations. Here they are in more-or-less random order.

Eclipse was very well represented at JavaOne. For example, it was amazing the degree to which Eclipse showed up in the keynotes:

• In Sun’s keynote by Jonathan Schwartz, Research in Motion provided a demo of an Eclipse-based J2ME toolkit.
• In Oracle’s keynote by Thomas Kurian, Oracle announced its proposals to lead two additional projects at Eclipse: Java Server Faces and BPEL.
• In BEA’s keynote by Mark Carges, Eclipse was highlighted in the tooling demos.
• In Nokia’s keynote by Pertti Korhonen and Jon Bostrom, Eclipse was shown in several different ways. First, as the basis for Nokia’s J2ME tooling. And in what I thought was the demo of the show, they demonstrated creating and deploying a SWT/eSWT application which ran on both a Nokia 9300 and Windows. Very cool.
• And last but not least, IBM’s keynote by Robert Leblanc mentioned Eclipse in several places and demo’d AspectJ and AJDT.

Another interesting note: Bjorn and my talk was in the top ten (#7) for all the sessions on Monday. We probably would have done better if they’d been able to count all of the people they turned away.

One of my personal highlights was quaffing a few ales at the Thirsty Bear. I had heard so many stories about the original Eclipse community gathering there some years back. Eclipse’s presence at JavaOne has certainly come a long way since then. It was great to actually see the place. My personal favourite was the Polar Bear pilsener.

I had a interesting conversation with a fellow who was a huge fan of the Eclipse Web Tools project. He has been using it since WTP M1 to build internet banking applications and is very very happy. Quote: “You have no idea how much I love your tools.” Hats off to WTP!

I met a few of the folks from NetBeans at the show. Seemed like good guys.

The Eclipse passport and t-shirt giveaway in the exhibit floor was a huge success. I think over 500 “I use Eclipse” t-shirts were handed out.

I found it amusing that Eclipse’s booth was in the far back corner of the exhibit hall. Who was in the other extreme back corner? Microsoft. Hilarious.

The only downer note that I’ve had all week at JavaOne was when I read Dan Farber’s blog post where he quoted James Gosling saying “However, modules created for NetBeans won’t be supported in Eclipse. “Where do you draw the line–should we be donating engineers to work on DB2?,” Gosling asked. “IBM is funding Eclipse 100 percent…“.

How very sad to see such nonsense from a community leader.

James, any time you want to chat about how the Eclipse Foundation and its community is supported by its over 100 member organizations, drop me a line at mike at eclipse.org. Or at least read my previous post on Eclipse independence.

I just info from Denis (Eclipse webmaster) that part of the reason the site was slow was that we were hit by a DDOS attack at the same time the 3.1 release went up. Denis has dealt with that and the site is running better now.

Hopefully we can get back to the Million Download Challenge 😉

Here is the summary from Denis:

– Attacks came from about 15 unique IP’s
– Most of those IP’s belong to APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre)
– Attacks started as early as 10:00pm last night (Eastern)
– All the attacks were rapidly fetching the download clickthru script for a valid 3.1 download file, then aborting the download, thus artificially increasing the 3.1 count and generating useless connections to our site.
– Attacks were halted around 9:00am this morning by me
– Eclipse will be hosting a high-speed mirror within an hour
– website access still slow from the sheer amount of traffic, but usable

Well, Luis beat me to the punch, but Eclipse 3.1 is released and ready to go! We’ve doubled the bandwidth at http://www.eclipse.org, so hopefully the Million Download Challange will make me pay up big time to my favourite charity.

I would really like to thank the platform team for all of the hard work that went into making this release possible. The teams led by John Wiegand, Erich Gamma and Kevin Haaland truly are awesome. When you think of the scale of what they ship, the distributed nature of the team, and the fact that they’ve now hit their dates for four releases in a row it is just absolutely amazing.

Thanks to every committer and contributor who have helped make 3.1 a success!

On a JavaOne note, Bjorn and my talk at JavaOne was a lot of fun. I think this post by Donald Smith of Oracle shows that the interest in Eclipse at JavaOne remains huge.

Well dropping by the Eclipse booth this afternoon really made my day.

On the first day of the exhibit hall being open, the interest in the Eclipse Passport and the Eclipse t-shirts has been awesome. When I dropped by there was a line of at least twenty people there waiting to pick theirs up. And wandering around I’ve been bumping into lots of people wearing the Eclipse buttons from the various sponsors.

All in all a great success already! It is huge fun to see the community in action.

Hats off to the Eclipse marketing committee and the sponsoring member companies for making this such a great show of Eclipse community support.

Hot on the heels of my last post comes some very exciting news about the use of Eclipse in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space.

In my last post I talked about how James Governor‘s post on RCP showed that he really understands some of the potential of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) technology.

This week’s big news is the announcement that “Macromedia plans to deliver a next-generation rich Internet application (RIA) development tool based on Eclipse.”

Tim O’Reilly has some great things to say about this announce.

Macromedia’s announcement that their next generation enterprise Flash development tool, code-named Zorn, will be built on top of Eclipse, is a watershed moment both for Macromedia and for the open source movement. Macromedia’s choice of Eclipse speaks volumes about the impact of open source on commercial software development — and about Macromedia’s commitment to making Flash into an essential platform for next-generation internet applications.

When you add to this the fact that Eclipse also used as the tooling platform for OpenLaszlo, and it is clear that Eclipse has a very important role to play as the RIA space evolves.

If anyone has any ideas on how Eclipse could also support tooling in the Ajax area, please let us know. Maybe there’s something already going on, and I just don’t know about it?