It’s easy to install solutions from within Eclipse (Help -> Eclipse Marketplace…), for example, if you need Git support… simply use ‘git’ as a search term…

If you’re an Eclipse.org project, I highly recommend listing a release of your project if you want to make it easier for users to find your work. I’m a lazy user so anything that can be done to not have to enter a URL is a plus in my humble opinion.

So what’s missing? Well, I would like to see the marketplace work with other Eclipse plug-in distributors out there. I know that the marketplace supports pluggable marketplace providers as the folks at EclipseSource are taking advantage of this functionality via the Yoxos Market. However, I’m more looking at the folks within the IBM Lotus community who are doing cool things by having plug-ins for Symphony available via the web. I think both communities would benefit by having more cross-pollination with the plug-ins that would work in both environments. On top of that, I would like to see “appstore” like functionality at the marketplace in the future so people could offer their wares for sale if they wanted to. I know this isn’t easy due to the complications of selling goods in various countries and the tax laws that accompany that but we could start with a few pilot countries.

In the end, I think the marketplace makes it a lot easier to find Eclipse-related stuff and opens a lot of possibilities to make Eclipse more consumable for folks.

The EGit project is implementing Eclipse tooling on top of JGit, the Java implementation of Git. Both EGit and JGit moved to Eclipse in May 2009 and shipped 0.8 with Helios. The EGit and JGit teams are busily working towards 0.9 which is targeted for Helios SR1 (September 2010). This webinar will give an update on the project progress and more detailed information about the design and features. A demo will illustrate how it’s used in its own development process. It will also show how Gerrit Code Review, a JGit based review system developed for the needs of the Android community, can help to further improve development processes.

Please register if you want to attend and learn more about Git and Eclipse.

On a side note, there will be a free GitTogether event October 25-27th at Google HQ. Git contributors and users alike are welcome to attend. If you’re interested in Git and in the bay area, please consider attending.

Thirty or so people showed up and there was a lot of good presentations..

1. Elliott Baron, Path-Sensitive Static Analysis for C/C++
2. John Bossons, Wizards to make JPA value objects thread-safe
3. Jason van Zyl, m2eclipse and tycho
4. Chris Aniszczyk, Understanding and Using Git at Eclipse
5. Ian Bull, Managing your eclipse installs
6. Kenn Hussey, b3 Aggregator
7. Charley Wang, C/C++ function call visualizations
8. Andrew Overholt, Eclipse Linux Tools project

I talked about Git and demoed EGit a bit…

Afterwards, we headed to the Rose and Crown pub for drinks and food!

Overall, it was fun and thank you Eclipse Foundation for sponsoring the event!

During my morning coffee ritual I read through most of them… I was especially taken with Dana Blankenhorn’s article…

This was always a false image. Not that I have anything against a good parent’s basement, or a nice comfortable pair of jammies. And when open source was being born, at the bottom of the dot-bomb, there was high unemployment in the code-o-sphere.

But the coders and the coding were always professional. There have always been a lot of people in open source who knew how to make the coding train run on time.

So with Eclipse’ Helios dropping yesterday, right on schedule (even with everyone else watching the U.S.-Algeria game) it’s worth noting that this is the seventh straight year that the code has arrived on precisely the day it was supposed to.

Eclipse is the open source dog that does not bark. Its professionalism is the clue that unravels the whole case, and makes much else possible. Many things go wrong in our troubled world, but professionalism like this can get us through.

Ruff? Arf? Anyways, something to be proud of in my opinion.

Of course there was also some criticism…

The big problem with any Eclipse release if finding out what it’s all about and what you have to do to start using it. As with most open source projects, the documentation is terrible and idiosyncratic. Given time on-line tutorials and third -party documentation, books, howtos,.. will start to catch up with the new release but for the beginner it’s initially an impenetrable wall.

It’s not just basic documentation that is a problem. Finding out what any given Eclipse package or project does can be next to impossible. If you don’t already know what it’s is all about then the only way to find out is to download and experiment. This isn’t helped by the fact that currently the web-based help system seems to have a bug that stops it working. The Eclipse project is often flaky on features used by beginners – it’s probably because the Eclipse developers test the cool interesting stuff and mostly ignore anything trivial.

In addition the whole approach of the Eclipse documentation is to tell you about the development process of the project, how it was started, how many milestones have been kicked over and so on. All very personally satisfying but useless for the beginner who might actually be tempted to use this free IDE.

Adding easy to follow feature descriptions and introductory explanations to the front pages of the web site would probably increase the take up of Eclipse by a factor of 10 or more. Just because it’s open sources doesn’t mean it has to lack commercial acumen.

Ok, that’s fair enough, not every project has nice documentation like Xtext or some other Eclipse projects. However, I think we’re better than most. I’m not sure how we can improve besides having some consistent guidelines projects can follow so regardless of which project you go to, the documentation is presented in a similar fashion. Any ideas?

I’ll be speaking about Git tooling at Eclipse but there will be talks about JavaScript tools, Linux Tools, EclipseRT and other projects. So please sign up if you want to learn more about what is shipping with Helios and remember to tell your friends too!

So if you want to grab Helios a day early, why not consider supporting Eclipse by becoming a friend! We are almost at 360 Friends for Helios too!

Let’s fill that progress bar!

A few people have also pinged me about a Maven repository for JGit. You can find information on the repository on our download page.

An important thing to note is that I still consider the 0.8 release a beta (we are still in incubation). If you’re familiar with the Git CLI, the tooling should be pretty easy to pick up. We are planning to do a 0.9 release in late September for Helios SR1 which should contain the last missing pieces needed for mass adoption of Git within the Eclipse community. For now, if you like to live on the bleeding edge please give the 0.8 release a try and report any issues you find.

Thanks for the Eclipse.org project leads and committers out there that took the time to send screenshots and quotes. Also, while you’re at it, why not consider becoming a Friend of Helios and Eclipse to support Eclipse development!

Eclipse Summit Europe (ESE) tends to be one of my favorite Eclipse-related events because it’s a bit more of a smaller and intimate conference than EclipseCon is. I find myself having great technical discussions with folks after sessions and of course since we are in Germany, there’s great beer. So when you have time, please consider submitting a talk for ESE. I’m looking forward to a great program.

The event is graciously hosted by Red Hat and organized by Andrew Overholt.

If you’re interested in speaking or attending, please let us know. Sign up on the wiki! After the event, we’ll go for frosty beverages because speaking about open source makes me thirsty!