I agree.
While the latter (a platform) would be great, I agree that this will work only in very few cases. Initially, my idea was to create a new main category “Research Projects” beside “Tools” and “RCP Applications” on Eclipse marketplace with research oriented subcategories. For instance “dynamic analysis” or “intelligent code completion”. But you are right. Maintaining such a categorization would be a nightmare. An interesting alternative is to use tag clouds for grouping related projects. Readers that look at the cloud might select interesting looking phrases to learn more about the details and the projects behind the tag.

> Remember that specialization is a must in research.
Got that. But from my experience specialization often means a different solution to the same kind of problem. Grouping them (using tag clouds) could be worth doing.

However, this is just an idea how research projects could gain more attention from the community and how Eclipse could strengthen its position as IDE of choice for research projects.

I agree.
While the latter (a platform) would be great, I agree that this will work only in very few cases. Initially, my idea was to create a new main category “Research Projects” beside “Tools” and “RCP Applications” on Eclipse marketplace with research oriented subcategories. For instance “dynamic analysis” or “intelligent code completion”. But you are right. Maintaining such a categorization would be a nightmare. An interesting alternative is to use tag clouds for grouping related projects. Readers that look at the cloud might select interesting looking phrases to learn more about the details and the projects behind the tag.

> Remember that specialization is a must in research.
Got that. But from my experience specialization often means a different solution to the same kind of problem. Grouping them (using tag clouds) could be worth doing.

However, this is just an idea how research projects could gain more attention from the community and how Eclipse could strengthen its position as IDE of choice for research projects.

The other day I received the call for papers of WASDeTT-3, see http://www.info.fundp.ac.be/wasdett2010/
Question #2 in their list is: “Should academic tools be of commercial quality?”.
Maybe we can help them, or they help us. Eclipse might want to help spread the word about this workshop.
The program committee lists at least 2 people with specific Eclipse affinity: Bob
Fuhrer (IMP) and Markus Voelter (oAW). This doesn't mean the workshop will actually be attended by Eclipse-activists but the connection has been prepared. From a previous edition of the workshop I know that there is also a group who are not at all enthusiastic about Eclipse because they've “done the same many years ago in Smalltalk”. Just mentioning this because we have to be careful not to pretend we have the holy grail. Eclipse solves some problems which before Java we didn't have.

In order to recognize those projects that have a potential for code maturity I suggest two simple questions: (1) does the project maintain a significant test suite (with good coverage of error scenarii, too!) (2) does the project manage to stay up-to-date with new Eclipse releases. I remember that question (2) was a major crossroad during the Object Teams project: at a time when we still used much more copy&paste than today I had a student assistant working several months just on migrating our code from Eclipse 3.0 to Eclipse 3.2. Other team members called me crazy for doing so. Without this effort Object Teams would be dead by now. And I've seen other research projects quickly getting two or more releases behind and thus gradually losing the grip on deploying useable software.

Do you see more criteria like that? Making these explicit should help other researchers to recognize their own crossroads and help them make up their minds which road to choose. I'm sure some of them will actually chose the road marked “Eclipse”, but remember that in reality the gap between theory and
practice is much larger than what theory tells us. Much of these are uncharted waters.

In either case I'm not convinced that the label “research” builds enough commonality to make such effort worthwhile. Remember that specialization is a must in research.

In order to create synergy among research projects one would first have to define specific sub-areas (like, e.g., static analysis of Java programs) then you can perhaps find things that would benefit all research projects in that field (like, e.g., how to use the JDT AST for constructing data-flow graphs). Only once such a sub-area has been defined I see a chance that individual solutions can be collected and shared to foster reuse among research projects.

Perhaps greater commonality could actually be found in the development method: I see projects improving the functionality of existing plug-ins. Those projects could share their approach like: branching the Eclipse source code, using OT/Equinox for non-invasive adaptation etc.

Now, I can imagine a next generation of Eclipse innovation grants that explicitly encourage participation in an open source project (of course, it is still an issue trying to find out ways that open source participation would further the research). Also, eclipse.org could offer to host the project and provide resources that will persist after the project funding is finished (svn, bugzilla, webspace, mailing list, etc). The most important thing would be to get these researchers out to Eclipse events (eclipsecon, meetups, etc) where they can chat with Eclipse users in the wild.

As for what makes a successful academic project become a successful open source project, an important criterion is that the project be led by a student who has no ambitions to stay in academia. Of the successful projects of this kind, that seems to be the key ingredient. And of the Eclipse-based research projects that were truly worthwhile, but did not leave academia, that was a missing ingredient.

Most PhD students enter their program thinking that they want to become a professor, but many leave realizing that they really don't want to. It's not that an eclipse innovation grant should try convince students that open source is better than academia (because that isn't necessarily the case), but for those students who are unlikely to stay in academia, this kind of grant could possibly show them that profoundly difficult, challenging, and fun problems exist outside of the ivory towers.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/8/59/abs…
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/397/a…

and one involving Resource Description Framework to be submitted too.

I experience it to be difficult to find a way to contribute back to the Eclipse community, not having funding for contributing to Open Source development, but typically for solving a scientific problem. Therefore, signing up to or even contacting projects like Orbit for the 3rd party libraries I create has to come from spare time, even though I clearly see the benefits in sharing those (for myself and others).

Otherwise, I am trying to interest my students to sign up for the Google SoC, and propose some work in this area. Personally, I have been GSoC mentor once and twice in a Dutch equivalent, and think this is a great way for Open Source projects to have starting scientists (aka M.Sc. and PhD students) contribute to e.g. Eclipse.

In response that there's not enough reason for an aspiring academic to contribute to the Eclipse community, well that's the problem I'm trying to address. I would hope that exposure would be a benefit for folks. I know the GEF3D project has benefited from becoming an Eclipse.org project versus staying on their academic site. But that has mostly been through exposure via attracting contributors and building a small community.

In regards to some of the academic projects that have done well… it would be nice to understand why. I'm particularly interested in understanding how we can make something like Mylyn happen again, where you start with an open source project from academia and help turn it into a business. If you look at the composition of Eclipse, we should be able to offer some serious advise to these projects.

I don't know if IBM is still doing the Eclipse innovation grants. I recall that they shifted all that work to focus on Jazz now. However, that doesn't mean that the Eclipse Foundation can't come up with a comparable program.

Eclipse Marketplace could be a great platform to provide additional information to these research projects.

Academicians who focus too much on the software itself, or making a community do so at their peril and their academic credentials suffer because they are not working towards their Big Idea. (I'm not trying to be cynical here, this is just my experience and the reason why I left academia).

Right now, there is just not enough reason for an aspiring academic to contribute to the Eclipse community. All it will do is slow someone's PhD down while they work on polishing their code.

Perhaps the best thing that the Eclipse community can do is show how great it is to be working in it and to convince some aspiring professors (who are also good programmers) that life outside the hedges may be better for them than staying in academia. (It worked for me.)

On the other hand, IBM had some good Eclipse innovation grants, which fostered quite a few good projects. However, most of these projects died (with notable exceptions (Mylyn, Zest, …)) when the student graduated. This is OK, because usually the project is more about the idea than the code.

The problem with these innovation grants is that there was no requirement to engage the Eclipse community. I would have liked to have seen a track at EclipseCon where all recipients of these kinds of innovation grants are invited (required?) to present their work.