We have recently completed the second annual survey of the Eclipse user community. This is a study conducted by Evans Data and is sponsored by the Eclipse Foundation and some member companies. Although most of the study is only available to the sponsored companies, I have posted a small subset...
One of the most frequent questions that I get asked is “How many Eclipse users are there?” Unfortunately, this is not an easy question to answer for an open source community. Well, IDC has just made available a new research report that estimates there to be 2.27 million Eclipse users...
John Cunningham at Band XI has been working with the US Army on a very cool application based on Equinox. The application, called Cyrano, allows the National Guard to use hand-held computers to monitor sensors for nerve agents, cyanide, radiation and other nasty things. The US National Guard used it...
We just posted a great new tutorial titled “ Building Project Facets” by Konstantin Komissarchik of BEA Systems on Eclipse Corner. If you want to know what facets are, and how you can use them to extend the capabilities of the Web Tools Platform, this tutorial will set you straight...
Yesterday, I submitted my position paper for the Rich Client Applications Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe. My position is basically that Eclipse Rich Client is good, components a la Equinox are king, and that folks should be building domain specific extensible platforms using Eclipse Rich Client technology. To be completely...
I needed a good calendar widget, so I took a look around. There are quite a few calendar widgets out there for Eclipse, but none of them did quite what I wanted. I looked at modifying one to better suit my requirements, but it turned out to be a lot...
I’m finishing up the materials for the Callisto Bootcamp that I’m running at Eclipse World. I thought it might be a good idea to do a little expectation management for those of you who are planning to attend. Here’s the description as found on the conference program: The Callisto launch...
Yesterday, I introduced International Components for Unicode for Java (ICU4J) by describing how you can get rid of it. I feel pretty about about that, because ICU4J provides goodness that’s too important to simply dismiss. If you’re building applications for an international audience, you have to get this stuff right...
As noted in the Eclipse Wiki, ICU4J was adopted by Eclipse 3.2. ICU4J provides “more comprehensive support for Unicode, software globalization, and internationalization” than the standard java.text libraries, but comes at a cost. ~3MB to be inexact. The functionality provided by ICU4J is great to have… if you need it...
There has been a flurry of articles and blogging today regarding the process by which Sun will release Java into open source. I believe that this is a topic of specific interest to the Eclipse community, given our basis in open source and extensive use of Java. Apparently yesterday Sun...