I decided that it might be cool to find out which projects are being used together in the wild, so I wrote a new report using data collected by the Usage Data Collector (UDC). The report shows a table where each row contains a pair of projects and a number. The number represents the number of users who have used at least one of the bundles from each of the projects. I’ve garnered some delightful insight from this report.
First, it’s interesting to me to note that there are two people out there that have mylar bundles installed (“mylar” is the former name of the “mylyn” project). I assume that this is somebody who just has the bridge “do nothing” bundles that were created as part of the the transition to the new name. What’s particularly interesting about that is that somebody actually installed the UDC into what I’m sure is an existing Eclipse 3.3-based product to produce this input.
Second, RAP seems to be used in conjunction with JST by a lot of folks. I guess that this feels natural, but in my own dealings with RAP thus far, I have not used both RAP and Java EE explicitly together (and no, JST is not a prerequisite for RAP). My guess is that a lot of folks out there doing RAP stuff are also doing Java EE stuff.
Some of the usage numbers are impressive. Data tools, Device Debugging, Test and Performance Tools Platform are used by a lot of folks.
The report needs some improvement. First, I’m identifying the project by extracting the third segment from the bundle name, (i.e. “org.eclipse..whatever”. I’ve tried to gather up all the names used by the Platform project and dump them into a single “platform” entry, but I think that I’ve missed a couple. Also, there are some other bundles that are not quite following the rules that I’ll have to sort out. Presently, the report only looks at bundles with names that start with “org.eclipse.” and doesn’t consider versions.
I’m also a little skeptical about some of the numbers. Some of them feel a little high (especially when compared against numbers from the other reports). while I’m confident in the pairings and the relative magnitude of the numbers, it’s probably a little early to start basing any decisions on them.
Anyway… enjoy the Project Pairings report. And please do let me know if you can think of any way to improve it.
