It’s official. I am the new PMC Lead for the Technology Project. It’s all about the power. All must kneel before Zod. Actually… it’s all about responsibility. That, and the power to crush your enemies. Can you tell that I’m of two minds?

As a few of you are already aware, I’ve started a process of going through the many projects that fall under the Technology Top-level project. I’m reviewing these projects for a couple of reasons: first, I need to know more about what they do, why they exist, and where they are going. I want to be able to effectively tell people about these projects. Second, I want to make sure that these projects are doing the right sorts of things to set themselves up for success.

I’ve decided to go through them alphabetically, so ACTF and Albireo have been the first to suffer my wrath benefit from some gentle prodding (Voice Tools Project, feel free to start without me). I’ve been looking the projects over with an eye for liveliness. Active participation by project committers is certainly a part of that, but I’m more interested in the community being developed around the project. At Eclipse, the community is king.

I’m looking for a few things:

Is the project’s information complete and up-to-date? Does the project’s web page contain enough information that readers have a fighting chance of understanding what the project is all about and what it provides? Is the content grammatically and technically correct? Is the project-info page complete? Is there a project plan? Is it easy to find? An important part of developing a community is making the barrier for entry as low as possible; making your web presence as complete and correct as possible goes a long way in this regard.

How big/active is the community? This is difficult to quantify, but you can get a general feeling by looking at the activity on the newsgroups and mailing lists. Are the project’s committers engaging with their community on their newsgroup(s) (i.e. are they answering questions in a timely manner)? I look at the Bugzilla records: are folks other than the project committers raising bugs? I also look at download statistics.

FWIW, all projects should have at least one member monitor eclipse.newcomer.

How does the project define their community? Developing a community is easier if you know who your target audience is.

How is the project engaging the community? Does the project have at least one member blogging regularly? Is that blog aggregated on Planet Eclipse? Is it aggregated elsewhere? What conferences are project committers speaking at? What other forums are being used?

I’m approaching this in a how-can-I-help-you-help-yourself manner. The fact of the matter is that I don’t have any real sticks that I can use in this role. Despite what some of you may have heard to the contrary, I don’t generally like using sticks anyway (I’m more into the empty-hand thing). I hope that you all agree, that developing that all-important community is important and that we can work together to make it happen.

We have what has been referred to as an “embarrassment of riches” in Eclipse Corner. We have a lot of articles that are either in development, or are ready for publishing. The problem is that we have a bit of a shortage of reviewers and editors. Perhaps one of the problems is that we do not formally recognise the role of reviewer and editor in the process. I’d like to fix that.

A reviewer needs to be an expert in the subject area of the article. Ideally, reviewers are Eclipse committers (but I don’t think that this is an absolute necessity). The reviewer’s job is to make sure that the content of the article is technically correct. Very often, an article crosses the boundaries between Eclipse projects and so more than one reviewer may be required (i.e. one for each project referenced by the article). When the author and reviewer are done iterating over the content, an editor steps in and puts the final touches on the article. An editor is familiar with the subject area, but need not necessarily be an expert in the field (frankly, it’s great when an editor learns something in the process of editing an article). Editors need to have decent English-language spelling and grammar skills.

Do you have what it takes to be a reviewer or editor? It’s easy to do, just take a look at the bugs open against “Articles” in Eclipse Bugzilla, find an article that interests you, add a comment to the effect of “I’d like to [review | edit] this article”, and then immerse yourself in the role.

While I do relish the prospect of formalizing the role of reviewer and editor, I don’t want to formalize the process too much. Read over what the author has written so far, and provide your feedback as comments via the bug system. If you have any questions about the process, or just want to get your opinions registered about this, please add them to Bug 243486.

To make things more interesting for you, reviewers and editors will now get swag as well. You’ll also get explicit credit for your efforts. And the gratitude of a community.

The SWT Graph Source Forge project provides some pretty sophisticated interactive graphical technology for Eclipse RCP-based applications. The sample images shown on the examples page are pretty cool, but the description of the underlying technology seems even cooler. Layered canvases are a natural and very powerful extension to SWT.

It’s licensed under the LGPL. Make sure you review that license carefully!

Ingress CAFÉ (Consolidated Application Foundation for Eclipse) was selected as the Best Application Development Tool at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo this week. Congratulations!

Dmitry Leskov introduced me to Excelsior JET at JavaOne this year.

Excelsior JET 6.5 will enable you to compile your Eclipse RCP application to a native code executable and distribute it without the original class/jar files.

My first question, when Dmitry showed me JET in action was whether or not it supports the OSGi dynamic runtime. The answer is yes (which is reflected in the FAQ): even with your RCP application compiled using JET, you can still dynamically install and load OSGi bundles at runtime.

The first beta of Excelsior JET, supporting Linux and Windows, is available now. I’ve only just started playing with the Linux version, but it looks promising.

I’ve got some numbers from from the usage data collector for the month of July. It’s the first full month of real data. Currently, I’ve only got data for commands, views, editors, and perspectives used; the information is restricted to only show those entries that start with “org.eclipse.”. You can change the sort order of the table by clicking in the columns.

I haven’t been able to update the “project proximity” report. There’s just too much data for the query I’m running. Once I optimize the query, I’ll update that report too.

I generally enjoy reading Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog. Yesterday his post, Quantity Always Trumps Quality, made me think of two things. First, the thoughts conveyed are exemplified at Eclipse: we value code over specifications; code is written, mistakes are made, lessons are learned, and everything gets better in the process. Second, it made me think if advice I give new grads and new hires: write lots of code.

Mistakes are okay so long as you learn from them. Oh… and be careful what you decide is API, you may have to live with it for a long time.