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.

I especially like the part when they mention the benefits of extensibility, easy deployment and leveraging existing OSGi assets. Oh, the mention that they get “better tooling with Eclipse IDE and its first class Java and plugins editors and Java debugger” is a nice touch too. In all seriousness, the more OSGi gets exposed in the significantly large Lotus ecosystem the better.

And indeed this focus on collaboration and integration with the other products in IBM’s suite, as well as the way IT departments can integrate custom applications through the Eclipse framework, is Note’s biggest strength right now.

It’s pretty cool when the mention of Eclipse starts turning up in more mainstream news outlets like PCMagazine.com… now it’s back to reviewing patches…

What’s neat about this from an Eclipse perspective? Well first off, Lotus Symphony is an RCP application (technically based on Lotus Expeditor). Another interesting tidbit is the possibility of extending the editors using well-known Eclipse semantics like extensions and extension points.

In the end, it’s an interesting use of Eclipse in my opinion.

The new version of Notes shipped today. This will probably mark one of the largest RCP deployments if not one of the coolest in my opinion. I still get a kick out of starting Notes with “-console” and doing silly things with the OSGi console

Oh, on a side note, it’s funny to see that one of my favorite IBM Zurich interns has launched an assault on the Eclipse mailboxes. Ah interns, what can you do without them

Why is this important for the Eclipse community? It will probably mark the largest deployment of Eclipse-based technology (definitely outside the developer space). This is a good sign that Eclipse is growing and has shed its image as only a tooling platform.

The only question is what’s next?

The big news in Lotus Notes V8 is that the Notes V8 client encapsulates all the code that is Lotus Notes within the Eclipse environment. This move puts Lotus Notes on an open-source Java-based platform. Originally created as an integrated application development environment, its open, plug-in-based architecture has made Eclipse itself the foundation for rich client platform development. Lotus Notes V8 is built on Lotus Expeditor, IBM’s universal managed-client software, which, in turn, is built on Eclipse.

In the end, this is great news for Eclipse which now gets to interact with a whole new set of users and developers.

Eclipse (OSGi) on clients… devices… servers… , what’s next?

My offer always stands if anyone is in the Orlando, FL area next week and wants to partake in some frosty beverages while talking open-source