Sitting at home in my pajamas with a fever and a sore throat does not usually put me in an great mood. However, there have been a number of news items this week that really do make for some very good news for the Eclipse community and ecosystem that I wanted to write about.
In no particular order:
- The Eclipse community kicked ass in the JDJ Reader’s Choice Awards. “Eclipse” or “Eclipse IDE” won five first place awards for Best Java Application, Best Java Debugging Tool, Best Java IDE Environment, Best Java Open Source Product, and Most Innovative Java Product. SWT (the Standard Widget Toolkit) won Best Java Class Library. EMF and WTP were also finalists in several categories.
But if you dig a little deeper, it gets even better. By my count products based on Eclipse won more five categories and were finalists sixteen more times. Products such as MyEclipse, JBuilder 2007, WebLogic Workshop, Together and Actuate BIRT all did very well in the voting.
Congratulations to all!
- I noticed announcements on three brand-new Eclipse-based products this week that look pretty interesting. First, RedHat beta released its RedHat Developer Studio to numerous positive reviews. Second, CodeGear is shipping JGear, which provides Java application performance, visual development, and team collaboration capabilities not part of Eclipse. Third, Motorola released MOTODEV Studio, their development tools for a wide array of Motorola products.
Obviously, growth in products based on the Eclipse platform continues rapidly. My apologies to any cool new products that I missed.
- We had three new project proposals this week. I invite you to check out and comment on Abireo [Swing/SWT integration], Open Financial Markets Platform, and Virtual Prototyping Platform.
I find the Financial Markets proposal particularly intriguing as it is being proposed by a bank and represents a foray by the Eclipse community into a whole new and very interesting world of finance.
- And last but not least, the Eclipse community model received some nice coverage in blogosphere by Matt Asay and Glynn Moody and in the press by Paul Krill. It’s always nice when someone thinks that Eclipse is open source’s best kept secret.
Not bad for one week, eh?
