Jeff on Eclipse

Now that Ganymede is out the door and the teams have had a chance to breathe a bit, its worth taking a few minutes to think about how you can promote all the hard work you’ve put into the release. One of the best forums you could ask for is Eclipse Summit Europe. I’ve been to all of the ESE events and have found them to be fantastic. The conference is chock full of interesting people and talks. The venue is very inviting and if we are lucky, there will be another caipirinha night.  Why not make one of those talks (and drinks) be yours this year? The first step is to propose a talk. The conference is in November but the talk submission deadline is coming up in September. Don’t put it off, submit early and often…

This is just too cool. The ECF guys (in particular Mustafa Isik) have some up with a system for real-time shared editing mechanism called Cola. I’ve not tried it myself but the screencast they put together is so compelling that I had to stop watching it and post this! Check it out. Very cool. And the HD mode on the video is awesome. Well done guys.

p.s., yes I realize that I used “cool” three times in this short post. What can I say…

For what I believe is the first time in the history of the Eclipse Foundation we are changing the by-laws. What has prompted this? Effectively the success of Eclipse has changed the dynamics around membership. The current membership structure does not match with what members are looking for. The Board has come up with a new structure and the Foundation has produced an excellent page of information describing the changes and detailing the reasons.

To me the key thing is that under the new model we offer more opportunity for members to express their committment to Eclipse and get value from Eclipse. That in turn means revenue that more accurately reflects the value of Eclipse and, in the end, better services for the community. Everyone wins.

So, what does this mean to you? First, it means that you MUST vote. These changes require super-majority (two-thirds plus one) approval of the Membership-at-Large to become effective. If you are eligible to vote (all committers and member representatives get a vote), you will have already received an e-mail with your voting information. It is dead easy. Two clicks. If you did not get voting information but think you should have, contact the foundation.

It is vital that you vote. If you do not vote then you are, in fact, voting no. This is bad. Your apathy will prevent the progress of the Eclipse community. The Committer Reps are strongly in favor of these changes and urge you to vote and to vote YES.

This morning marks the start of a series of Ganymede articles on InfoQ.  The first article is on p2!  It is essentially an interview with me and Pascal.  We talk some about the technology and some about it evolution and how we got here.  Happy reading.

There has been a lot of discussion in a variety of places recently about the barriers to entry of various Eclipse projects or projects being closed to contributions etc. I agree. Frankly, the situation sucks. Several of the projects with which I am involved are more or less opaque to the outside world. This is not by design or plan or any form of ill-will. Nor am I or the teams happy about this. For the most part it is a result of people fixing bugs, adding features and generally hacking code rather than writing doc, examples and getting started guides. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

So, what can be done. Certainly the project teams are very keen on improving the situation, but where to start? There are so many enhancements, bugs and features to work on. Ultimately, we have to make the time to do what it takes to grow the contributor base.  Status quo will not do.

The community is keen to use the technology and contribute where they can, but the wall seems so high. In many ways it is but you have something that can lower the wall — a Bugzilla ID.

With Ganymede on the horizon we are about to get hordes of eager consumers taking the latest we have to offer and put it to their use. They will have lots of questions and perhaps even the odd problem or two. Many people in the community today know the answers or “have been there and done that”. If you have a Bugzilla ID (who doesn’t?) then you can comment on and triage these bugs. This is a huge contribution. How big? Let’s look at some numbers.

Since June 1, 2008 and 2 minutes ago (i.e., 10 working days), 629 bugs were created in the Eclipse project Bugzilla bucket alone. Even at 1 minute per bug for triage (short for dealing with new bugs but it keeps the math simple) that is more than 10 hours of time just to manage the flow of new bugs for two work weeks.

Could you really make a difference? Many hands make light work. It turns out that 103 of those bugs have since been closed as Duplicate, WorksForMe or Invalid. There are many people in the community who could help with this sort of work. Quite a number already do! THANKS. It is not glorious work but given that time taken to determine these resolutions is often in addition to the initial triage, man does help.

But wait! There’s more you can do with that Bugzilla ID. You can write and revise wiki pages! Whether it is Getting started guides, FAQs, Tips and Hints, Examples, … if you have spent the time to figure it out, write it down in the wiki.

Contributing in this way has many great characteristics:

• No/low barrier to entry. If you figured something out and have a Bugzilla ID then you can help
• Lowers the barrier of adoption for the community by helping them get started and avoid the pitfalls you have already found.
• Makes you feel good.  Plain and simple.
• It is one of the first steps towards deeper involvement in the project
• Committers see you helping and have a tendency to want to help you
• People from outside the implementation team have a great opportunity and ability to give a fresh perspective that teams often don’t see.
• Even better, it saves time for the committer team. They then have more time to fix bugs, implement enhancements and add features. Some of these may even be things you wanted done!

I do not mean to imply that the challenge rests solely on your shoulders. The teams need to make the time to bring the community along. Several people have pointed out good progress. There is more to be done. Stay tuned…

Nor do I imagine for a second that bug triage and wiki pages solve all the problems or tear down all the barriers. They certainly can’t hurt.

I’ve mentioned previously that Eclipse is coming alive as a place for runtime technology. The last few days have seen some more concrete steps down that path. Last Wednesday the Eclipse RT top-level project had a successful creation review. So over the next few days the project itself will be provisioned and open for business. In the proposal there were 6 projects declaring their intention to move: Equinox, RAP, ECF, Swordfish, Riena and EclipseLink. While the path is now clear for these moves, I wouldn’t expect to see a mad rush. Each project will move at its own pace. After all, several of the projects are shooting to release in the next few months and really don’t need the distraction of messing with repositories, bugs, etc. There are several other projects including eRCP, EILF and Corona that have expressed interest in a new home. Most likely there will be some discussions on this at EclipseCon and on the RT newsgroup in the coming days.

In other news, today we are announcing the creation of an Equinox Community portal. The portal is a recognition that runtime technology at Eclipse spans the entire ecosystem today and will continue to do so tomorrow. We can’t (and actually don’t want to) contain it all in the RT project. The portal is a landing site for people looking to know more about Eclipse in runtime scenarios. It gives you a view of Eclipse through runtime glasses. You can information on the related projects and technologies, demos, tutorial, articles and other resources.

If you are at EclipseCon on Tuesday, come by the Equinox Community talk that Jochen Krause and I (the RT PMC co-leads) are giving. The slides will be on the web and there is a white paper that paints the vision and benefits of the approach we see evolving. Also check out Ian’s post for more info.  (Damn that Ian for posting before me…)

I’m a fan of simplicity. Hopefully that shows through in the Code 9 website.

As mentioned elsewhere (here here here), the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors election results are in. I am very pleased to have been re-elected for another term.  I mentioned in my vision statement that working on the board is extremely educational and gratifying.  Gaining the support of the community to do that work is doubly so.  Thanks to everyone who voted and to the other candidates for making it an interesting process.

I have to say however that I am bummed that Howard Lewis, a long time elected add-in provider representative, chose not to run again this year so tomorrow will be his last board meeting.  It is our loss.  Thanks Howard for many years of great service to the Eclipse community.

You know those times when you are blissfully away from email and you come back and all hell has broken loose? That’s me today as I read the various posts and messages about e4. Hopefully the following will help make things better rather than making them worse…

First, to dispel some myths.

• There is no evil plan. Actually, there is really only a plan to make a plan.
• There is no prototype. There are some wads of code that people have used to test and express their ideas. Some of those wads are useful as demos. Some as stalking horses. None of the code is real in any way.

Ok, so what’s happened here? At least part of it is a miscommunication/misunderstanding around the creation of an “e4″ component in the Eclipse Project Incubator. That component is NOT e4. So what is it? Aside from being unfortunately named, it is a place to put the demo code and random hackings that would be used to facilitate discussions around creating an e4 proposal and interesting EclipseCon talk.

There is no doubt that the Eclipse project team has a reputation for being closed. Being more open has been one of our goals for the past couple years. There has been good progress but there is still a ways to go.

In any event, it is actually the, perhaps clumsy, implementation of the desire to be open and create the open community structures (e.g., projects) that has gotten us here.

Early on there was discussion around branching the platform code in-place, doing the work in a set of Eclipse project incubator components, … We quickly saw that making a full-on project was the only right direction.

In the normal process of creating a project

An individual or group of individuals declares their interest in, and rationale for, establishing a project. The EMO will assist such groups in the preparation of a project Proposal.

So the current incubator component and all discussions up to now have really been focused on getting to the point of proposing a project. Not on actually doing the work.

Once a project is proposed

The proposers, in conjunction with the destination PMC and the community, collaborate in public to enhance, refine, and clarify the proposal.

So the proposal is the real beginning of collaboration, community building and the work.

The communication around, and creation of, the e4 component confused things and was (reasonably) perceived as saying “here is e4 and these people are working on it and there is a direction and …”.  Its all done so to speak.  In reality it is none of the above.

It could be (and has been) reasonably argued that more communication in the pre-proposal phase would have been the way to go. In retrospect, that looks like wise advice.

With mea culpas, clown noses and red faces all around the team, I propose that we, collectively, all of us, attempt to reset our thinking and perceptions, and make the reality be a completely open, innovative and interesting e4 project that takes Eclipse to the next level.

Each year when the board election comes around I have to remember how it works.

By now everyone eligible should have received a password email enabling them to vote. If you have a password and have not yet voted, please do so now. There’s no point in having an election if people don’t vote.

Now, if you do not have a password but think you are eligible to vote, read on…

Only members can vote.

Who is a member? Well, committers who work for a member company or those independent committers who have signed individual committer membership papers.

Apparently some very small number of independent committers go through the process of becoming a member. You should. Its pretty easy. I recently left IBM and became an independent committer. Walking the process to become a member took about 10 minutes and most of that was the time to print and fax the forms.

These forms are different from the committer paperwork that you filled out. Membership is not automatic.

If you hurry, you might be able to get the forms in and processed in time to vote. Why bother? Well, for one, your vote will count for as much as all of IBM’s, Oracle’s, Intel’s, … Votes from committers at member companies are aggregated down into one vote so us independents wield just as much power as the big guys.