I am probably not the only Chinese blogging about Eclipse in English, but I believe that I am one of the most active one. Something related with this background, I would like to point out that today is the Chinese new year. And this year is the year of “rat”s.
So, how is it related with Eclipse? Actually, if you ask me which one of the 12 animals can best describe the life of software developers, I would like to say the “rat”. So, this year is the year of software developers.

My talk has been accepted by EclipseCon 2008. Although the travel has to be approved yet, it is very likely that I will be able to go Santa Clara again this year.

Actually, I attended EclipseCon in 2005 and talked in 2006. That of year 2007 was missed due to the busy status of my project. It was the EclipseCon that brought me the chance to meet all the people working around related things and finally lead to the acquisition of my committer status. So, I am really excited about attending EclipseCon again.

However, I am bored with all the troubles with US visa. The whole process of visa application is rather time consuming and iirational. The first time when I was applying a US visa four years ago, I got a multi entry one valid for one year. It allows me to present at several conferences in the US that year, and I was feeling so good with the US. When I had to renew my visa after that year, they kept me waiting for 3 months. Until one week before the conference, I could no longer wait and send emails, faxes to the consulate and finally get one - but only a single entry valid for three months. Why? Both due to the busy status of my project and the fact that I tried to avoid traveling into the US, I greatly reduced the number of times that I had to attend conferences in the US in the last two years. By the end of last year, there was one important meeting which I had to attend and I stated the whole process again. And this time, after keeping a good record of entering and leaving the US for more than 6 times, I am still kept waiting until I could not wait any more. Again, I get a visa for single entry, although I have submitted documents that I have several conferences to attend in the coming year. Well, if that is all the troubles I met, I would be much happier. The case is that, I was put into a special list of people that are required to go through a second interview, after arriving the Los Angeles airport. And, I have to report to the same office again when I leave the US one week later. The reason - “Tech Match” - what is that? Although I do believe that I am a good developer, but I never thought that I know some special techniques that will threaten the US or any countries. Because I am working on the Eclipse parallel tools platform and I am doing projects on Grid computing? But do those guys really know what they are? All these seem to me is that the US is not welcoming people from other countries as it was before. I really hope this will not happen again this time.

Many “old” developers of high performance applications have concern about the usage of Eclipse - I can do a lot of work with Emacs or vi already, why do I need Eclipse?

Well, it is always said that one picture is more than a hundred words. Let me explain with the following picture which I took near Reno:

Yesterday morning, I had an breakfast with people from a famous company which used to be one of the most important vendor of high performance computers before twenty years. They have been pushed externally to provide support on Eclipse, but have completely no idea how they should do it. They also have some concern about the feasibility of this approach, regarding the effort that are demanded to port or re-implement their existing tools to Eclipse.

I fully understand what their concerns are. I agree that it will demand a lot of work to reach the same level of functionality of the existing tools. And it is hard to evaluate the exact amount of work before you do some initial experiment. Most important, all of us agree that their company should have a long term plan on Eclipse support.

They shown great interest in my previous work around Eclipse and high performance computing. And even though I’ve told them that I have accepted another job, they still show great interest in me and tries to allure me to join them. Besides, they are also planning to establish a new development department in Europe and need a lead. I like this feeling - it makes you feel that you are important :-).

The reason I blog this issue is to point out that even such companies are now facing strong pressure (from their customers) to support Eclipse. Although those developers does not like it, now they have to do it.

Tonight will be the PTP BoF at SC07. The coming 2.0 release of the PTP will be definitely the focus of the BoF. Besides, discussions on the performance framework as part of PTP will also be a hot topic. Currently there are different performance tools (for example the Performance Cockpit from TUM, the TAU plug-in from U Oregon) that are leveraging Eclipse and PTP, but they does not cooperate, nor do they have a common usage pattern. A common framework for performance tools will be profitable.

There was an meeting between people from IBM and several Munich-based institutes and computing centers this morning at 6 am (that is correct!). As part of the meeting, people discussed potential items that can collaborately work on. These include the extension of Eclipse PTP into a user interface for Grid users, and the generalization of the performance tools that exist today (Performance Cockpit from TUM and the plug-ins for TAU).

I’m at the SC07 conference. This year’s SC is hold at the Reno Sparks Conventional Center in Reno, NV. All the major developers of PTP are here. About 30 people came to the PTP tutorial today. More discussions on PTP will be happening during PTP BoF and internal meetings.

Hi, I’m Tianchao.

I have been reading the blogs from people in the Eclipse community for a long time, and only recently have decided to start write my own Blogs. Partially because I was not sure if I can write Blogs that often.

Most people that know me also recognize the Eclipse PTP (Parallel Tools Platform) project. There is relatively less information about this project exposed, concerning its development process and status. A Blog with a focus on PTP might be able to arouse the interest of more people and push forward the PTP project further. That’s the major intuitive for this blog.