The second announcement we are making at JavaOne (here is the first) is the launch of Eclipse Plugin Central (EPIC). Many of you already know EPIC; in fact it has been in existence since 2004. The new news is that the EPIC Alliance (Innoopract, Instantiations and Genuitec) has contributed the existing EPIC portal to the Eclipse Foundation. We will be running EPIC as a component of the open source Phoenix project and the three founding companies will remain actively involved.
So you might ask ‘why the change’? In my opinion, the Eclipse ecosystem is a key factor in the success of Eclipse. Although sometimes difficult to count, there are over 1000 product/plug-ins, 950 Eclipse related projects on SourceForge and I would estimate over 200 ISVs using Eclipse as the platform for their products. So how can we best promote this ecosystem and make it easy for users to find high quality, relevant plug-ins that meet their needs. Having a portal and central repository of all Eclipse products is one way to accomplish this task.
By making EPIC a part of the eclipse.org web site, we hope to drive additional ‘eye-balls’ to the portal and encourage our members and the entire community to post their products and services on EPIC. We also plan to invest some of the Foundation’s resources, mainly Nathan, Donald and myself, to compliment the existing resources from the EPIC Alliance, and help operate and expand the EPIC site. Finally, since we will be operating it as part of Phoenix, we hope we will get help/advice and feedback from the community.
I would like to say a big THANK YOU to Instantiations, Genuitec and Innoopract for making this happen. These three companies have been long time supporters of Eclipse and continue to contribute their own time and resources to make Eclipse a better community.
So, if you have an Eclipse product and it is not listed, make sure you take the time to list it now. If you are looking for an Eclipse product, check out EPIC.
