Life at Eclipse

Joe Winchester sent me an email asking whatever happened to the last slide presented at EclipseCon this year. You know, the one that talked about the various consumption patterns of the attendees. Well, here it is.

You really have to wonder if there is a correlation between the 792 gallons of coffee and the 2:00am peak internet use 🙂

I certainly have some fond memories of EclispeCon 2005. It will be a challenge to make it even better next year. BTW, it will be in Santa Clara on March 20-23, 2006.

One of the many hats that I wear is project lead for the Phoenix project at Eclipse. This is the project that we have proposed to rebuild the eclipse.org website.

The project is being set up using the same open source rules of engagement that other projects use at Eclipse. So please contribute via the eclipse.technology.phoenix newsgroup and/or the phoenix-dev mailing list. We will be getting CVS and Bugzilla set up after the project is officially created.

Once we get this project going, we are expecting to use an iterative approach to development. One of the first prototypes you can see is a mocked up home page with a new look and feel. Although we expect many changes, this can give you a feel for where the project team is thinking of taking the website. We would certainly appreciate lots of feedback on the newsgroup.

We’re really excited about this project. The Eclipse website has served us well for over three years now. But with the growth of the Eclipse community, we definitely need to re-invest in making it a more flexible and modern site.

Well, I am just about to pack it in and head to Tokyo’s Narita Airport for the flight home to Ottawa. The place is going to be a madhouse, as today is the start of Golden Week and is the largest travel day each year in Japan. Not very good planning on my part.

The enthusiasm for Eclipse in Japan is enormous. Everywhere I went, people knew all about it. In particular, there were many people who knew about several Eclipse projects, not solely our Java tools. There is a lot of interest in and use of CDT and TPTP, for example.

One of my favorite meetings was with Kazunori Mizushima, Eclipse supporter extraordinaire. About two-and-a half years ago, Mizushima-san first used the Eclipse JDT and fell in love with it. He noticed that there was a real lack of materials available for Eclipse in Japanese. So on his own initiative, he created eclipsewiki.net — a Japanese language wiki devoted to Eclipse. His site is now getting 6000 visits per day.

His latest accomplishment is authoring a Japanese book on Eclipse 3.0, that was just released last month.

It is the dedicated and energetic developers like Mizushima-san that really make the Eclipse community something special. Meeting people around the world with that kind of enthusiasm sure is a lot of fun.

This week I am in Tokyo speaking at a number of events and meeting with a number of member companies. This is my first time in Japan so I’m pretty excited about the trip, even though the jetlag already has me reeling.

The first event I am speaking at is the first general meeting of the Eclipse Japan Working Group. We are certainly thrilled to have companies such as Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM Japan, NEC and NTT Comware all supporting Eclipse in Japan.

The Eclipse community is huge here in Japan. I’ve seen a published survey of developers that in 2004 put Eclipse at 61% of the Java developer tools market. What’s really exciting though is that the same survey had Eclipse at 1% in 2002. Not bad, eh?

One of the interesting things about Eclipse is trying to define exactly what the label means. There is no doubt that it is an overloaded term.

• Eclipse is a plug-in based platform for building and integrating tools. And now with RCP, a platform for building and integrating applications.
• Eclipse is a great Java IDE.
• Eclipse is an open source community which is rapidly growing in terms of projects and committers.
• Eclipse is an ecosystem where open source projects and commercial offerings add value on top of the work done within the Eclipse projects. The term ecosystem is sort of all-encompassing. It includes our committers, users, developers, book writers, service providers, product sales guys. You name it.

Certainly when you read about Eclipse in the press and other places, it can certainly get confusing. I got a good laugh out of this Eclipse satire posting on JavaLobby. Certainly we had a PR storm around EclipseCon that exceeded our expectations, so we deserved the shot.

But I think that one spot where the satire missed the mark was that the author clearly just thinks of Eclipse as a Java IDE. Although that misperception is definitely prevalent, the fact is that we are now clearly a community. With over forty projects on the go, we hope that there will soon be many more award winners to accompany our Java tools.

I hope that down the road the word “Eclipse” will come to mean “a great open source community that has lots of interesting and useful projects”. But these types of changes take time.