Personally, I think Canada is a great country (I am a little biased). And in this great country, there are many wonderful cities: Victoria (British Columbia), IMHO, is the best. Curiously enough, I spent some of the best years of my life there. For the uninitiated, Victoria is a garden city with pretty darned nice weather all year round. It’s where Russ Courtnall played junior hockey and home of the 1994 Commonwealth Games. It’s also a hot bed of Eclipse.
Yep, that’s right, Canada’s home of the “newly wed and nearly dead” is a hot bed of Eclipse technology. The University of Victoria‘s Department of Computer Science has created some software they call GILD (Groupware enabled Integrated Learning and Development) which is an integrated learning and development plug-in for Eclipse. This software is used as part of their undergraduate programme; it’s also used by some other universities.
A good number of the committers on the Mylar project are from the University of Victoria, or across the strait at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. If you haven’t looked at Mylar yet, you should: it will change your life. Seriously.
I was contacted today by an instructor at a local college in Victoria. Camosun College uses Eclipse in it’s Java programming courses. As an added bonus, they’re apparently teaching JUnit to first-years which is totally awesome. “Whomever has the best tools wins”, indeed.
Several Victoria-based companies are building products based on Eclipse, including Refractions and PureEdge. Refractions produces a number of pretty darned interesting products, some of which are based on Eclipse RCP; this includes UDig, a “a GeoSpatial application and a platform through which developers can create new, derived applications.” PureEdge Designer, an e-forms application, is built using Eclipse Technology. PureEdge was acquired by IBM in 2005.
Bjorn has some history there as well, but I’m pretty sure it all predates Eclipse. I know my own hacking-6502-assembler experience in Victoria certainly does.
