On Thursday, there will be a virtual conference demoing some of the things part of the Eclipse Helios release.
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!
Since I’m a Friend of Eclipse, I was pleased to see this email today!
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!
Last week the EGit and JGit teams pushed out 0.8.4 as the final contribution to the Eclipse Helios release. A few people praised the teams on how quickly progress is coming along which is great. A few people have also asked about what is officially support in EGit versus typical command line usage so here’s a picture to help with that…
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.
The past couple days I’ve been in scenic Raleigh, NC for a Eclipse.org board meeting. The committer representatives and I brought a proposal forward to help alleviate some of the problems discussed in bug 313479. The goal is to expand the Friend of Eclipse program and use funds to benefit the entire Eclipse committer and contributor community.
Here’s the exact board resolution…
RESOLVED, the EMO is instructed to expand the Friends of Eclipse (FoE) program to:
a) provide greater community transparency regarding the allocation of funds, consistent with the Bylaws; and
b) consider greater inducements for larger donations.All donations will be used for the benefit of the entire Eclipse committer and contributor community.
The EMO will create a governance process for transparently allocating the FoE funds.
Stay tuned for details, the expansion should hopefully be implemented in the near future. In the end, the committer representatives hope this helps the Eclipse community and makes people think about becoming a Friend of Eclipse to support Eclipse!
My article about the Eclipse Helios release finally went live today at developerWorks.
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 2010 is happening towards in November this year and the CFP has just opened recently.
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.
Well I have some good news. I’ll be in scenic Toronto for the Eclipse Helios DemoCamp on June 29th, 2010. I’ll probably speak about Git and Eclipse unless people have other requests.
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! 🙂
Ian Skerrett recently posted the trends from the Eclipse Community Survey 2010.
What interests me?
“Linux continues to gain market share on the developer desktop”
“In 2007, 20% said Linux was their development operating system. Now, in 2010 almost a third (33%) say Linux. The biggest loser seems to be Windows 73.8% in 2007 down to 58.3% in 2010. Interestingly, Mac OS X has only gone from 3.5% to 7.9%.”
I expect this trend to continue with Windows losing a bit more share next year. On top of that, I would be really interested to see the segmented results of what open source developers use as their primary development operating system versus normal developers. I mean, I can’t be the only one who hasn’t noticed that any conference you go to that features a lot of open source developers… you tend to see a lot of shiny Macs. It’s almost scandalous given how closed Apple is with everything.
The other nice trend I like is regarding version control systems.
“Git usage up from 2.4% (2009) to 6.8% (2010). Mercurial usage also increased from 1.1% to 3%. This growth seems to be coming from the decreased use of CVS, 20% (2009) to 12.6% (2010). Subversion continues to be the most popular at 58.3%.”
I expect to see DVCS continue to rise next year when the tooling becomes better and people become more knowledgeable about their VCS options (if you been living in a centralized VCS world for a long time, making the jump to a DVCS takes some time). I think the trend of large open source communities (e.g., Eclipse) using or moving to a DVCS will help the trend toward DVCS dominance. This aligns nicely with one of my goals is to make sure Eclipse.org is running fully on Git soon.
I highly recommend taking a full read through the survey.
Last night we had an Eclipse Helios DemoCamp close to my home in sunny Austin, TX. It was nice to see some old faces and some new faces from Austin’s gaming community. Thomas Watson from IBM and the Equinox team discussed some Equinox/OSGi related things and in particular how the infamous bug 4922 got fixed (it’s not as easy of a problem as you think).
Who would have known the intricacies of getting the solution to work on a variety of platforms.
Ken Ryall from Nokia and the CDT team discussed what’s new in CDT 7.0 for Helios!
The CDT project is still going strong. We had an audience member from a gaming called BioWare (now owned by Electronic Arts) applaud the work that has gone in the CDT indexer. They use the CDT internally for some large projects (3+ million LOC) and are pretty pleased with the progress minus a few workflow issues. I was just thrilled to learn that folks within the gaming industry are using nice open source tools like Eclipse. Did I try to rope in the fellow to contribute to CDT? Of course but as we know there’s stages when it comes to engaging with an open source community, not everyone is at the same stage of the game.
Shawn Spiars talked about some of the advances in the SWT Browser Widget over the years.
I learn something new everyday… I didn’t realize all the neat Java-to-JavaScript and JavaScript-Java functionality in the SWT Browser widget API now.
Since my focus at Red Hat as of late has been Git, I ended up talking about how Git tooling is progressing at Eclipse and gave a demo of the latest EGit release.
People were very enthusiastic about having solid Git support at Eclipse.
In the end, I just want to say thanks for everyone who made it out and hope you enjoyed the beer. I look forward to the meetup of the Austin Eclipse community!
