JAX Innovation Award 2007

The JAX Innvotion Award 2007 is calling for submissions.

The JAX Innovation Award is focused on the European market and
honours the most remarkable and outstanding contributions in the world
of Java, Eclipse and - new - SOA. The prize money, a whopping 20.000
Euro, is up for grabs.

Pretty much anyone can hand in a contribution by March 19th 2007 as long as it lives in the world of Java, Eclipse or SOA.

Eclipse History Podcasts

During the last couple of days I have learned a lot about the history of the Eclipse Project. There is actually more on the web then I expected to find.

Now, John Kellerman pointed me to 2 really interesting Podcasts on Eclipse history. Check them out at IBM developerworks.

Part 1
Part 2

Stuttgart celebrates 5th Eclipse with special guest

I just got back from the Eclipse Happy Birthday party in Stuttgart. Most of the guys are probably still there enjoying the nice buffet and cocktails. As usual I will post pictures later on.

It was a great gathering of probably 70 people (I am bad at guessing crowds). Special guest at our event was Erich Gamma, one of the godfathers of Eclipse. Unfortunately I didnt get the chance to talk to him. Erich gave a brief overview of the way from closed to open source and lined out some interesting facts. Again, one of the core messages was that Eclipse lifes trough its community. This is also what Mike mentions in his blog today. We then switched to Erich's colleagues in Zurich (Daniel Megert and Martin Eschlikon) who gave a very cool and funny look back into former Eclipse versions.
This Stuttgart-Zurich interaction talk was followed by a interesting Eclipse facts quiz. I only knew the answers to questions who didnt win prices, but other were more lucky and the guys handed out books, eclipse shirts and umbrellas.

The crowd then motioned down to the main hall of the "Alte Scheune" (old barn) and started the cosy part of the night. All in all a great evening and lots of Eclipse enthusiastic people.

Hope all the other parties are as good as this one was, although it will be hard to beat Stuttgart :)

Eclipse turns 5 talk

As we are approaching the 5th birthday of Eclipse I am preparing a talk that I will hold at the IBM Germany lab on the 14th of November.

I am planing to give a brief overview of the steps Eclipse has taken in those 5 years and then talk about where we are now, giving a rough tour through Callisto. Is anyone giving similar presentations and interested to share slides and ideas ?

I have just downloaded and installed Eclipse 1 which I havent touched for the last 3 years or so. Its amazing how used you can get to those nice features provided in Eclipse 2 and 3. I was typing sysout and pressing ctrl+space and nothing happend :)

I took 2 screenshots to compare Eclipse 1 and Callisto. I will probably use them in one of my slides. Its quite cool to look back and see what Eclipse 1 was like, and its still working fine and easy to use.

Eclipse 1

Callisto

Eclipse Summit Day 2

Eclipse Summit finished with a great applause for the whole crew today. It was a really good success from my point of view and I believe many others feel the same. There where 3 tracks of talks and 4 symposia going on through the 2 days.

The overall message that came across was that Eclipse really is run by its Community. And there was lots of community stuff going on. I think one of the real benefits of those conferences is not only the presentations but rather the getting together during lunch, breakfast and dinner and talking to each other.

Here are some pix from day 2

The modeling guys presenting their new logo

The closing plenary (wrap up of the symposia)

The Eclipse Bistro

Wayne sells RCP :-)

Eclipse Summit Day 1

The first day of the Eclipse Summit Europe is already over. It has been a very great event. The Neckar Forum is a nice location with lots of good food :)

I tried to visit at least one talk of each of the tracks. I spent most of my time in the foundation track though. I think the Summit is success already after day1. People seem to have enjoyed it and the atmosphere was great. Looking forward to some interesting talks tomorrow. For example the talks on Modelling in Eclipse and Waynes talk on RCP.

Here are a few pix from day1.

TPTP Session

Outside

The Buffet

The Foyer

Reception

Eclipse Summit Europe

I have just arrived at Eclipse Summit a few minutes ago. Mike will start with a keynote in a few minutes and then I will be switching back and forth between the Callisto and the Foundation Track. I have seen some familar faces from the Planeteclipse and hope to get in touch later. Will try and post some pictures here during the conference.

IBM supports raw Eclipse

According to this article IBM will extend their support to the Eclipse Platform, meaning there will not only be support for IBM products based on Eclipse, but also for the core Platform functionality such as JDT or PDE. The support will be based on Eclipse version 3.2.

A nice outcome for the open source community is the new Eclipse section on developerWorks which provides tutorials and articles about Eclipse. That's where you will find for example Chris' 15 minutes GMF tutorial or my article on Cheat Sheets for Eclipse 3.2.