Google Summer of Code and Eclipse Forum 2009

Now that EclipseCon has passed by and probably most people are back in the office again (I hope your trip back was better than mine where we needed to interrupt our flight on Iceland because of a person requiring immediate medical assistance), it's time to prepare for the next topics that are of interest for the Eclipse Community.

First, at the end of this week the Google Summer of Code deadline approaches. This is a great opportunity for students interested in developing code to get involved! Surely this covers a lot of different platforms, but there is even an own Eclipse GSoC program where we ask interested students to get involved in the various Eclipse projects. So if you have any ideas, please feel free to let us know! Post them on the GSoC Eclipse wiki page, but also send an email to the mailing list and discuss our ideas in order to get a mentor. Finally, submit your idea until Friday to the Google webpage. Besides the financial aspect (you'd get $4.500 if your proposal is selected and everything works fine during this summer) it's a great opportunity to strengthen your developing skills and to get in contact with many interesting Eclipse people!

Second, the Eclipse Forum Europe already shows up on the horizon. Happening together with JAX and SOACon in April in Mainz, Germany, it is again a good opportunity to meet people and get some more knowledge about all the interesting projects in Eclipse. Since we only had a ten minutes talk at EclipseCon, the JWT project team is looking forward to now present our ideas and existing development in a long talk.

Meetings, meetings, meetings

Yesterday I didn't have the chance to listen to many talks at EclipseCon, because I used the opportunity to meet several people. After the keynote in the morning I sat together with John Graham, the mentor of our project JWT, which I actually met here at EclipseCon the first time and his colleague Koen Aers and we talked about how we can further improve our project.
After lunch I talked with Wayne Beaton, PMC lead of Technology, about JWT and about other project ideas that spin around in my mind. Then Jerry Preissler from Sopera had some time and since we always tried to fasten the collaboration with the STP project, it was really great to have some chat.
And the evening was dedicated to the poster session, where it's of course all about meeting people and discuss your ideas and code with their ideas and code. So this was really fun, too!

That's why I can't report too much about the conference yesterday, but I promise to get to some talks today again (e.g. my own presentation together with Chris at 10.10am about "Make your processes executable!").
If you are curious about other things that happened in the last two days, maybe this German blog might also be interesting for you.

Model and Execute!

The focus of the talks that I attended today at EclipseCon, was about modeling and execution. The first talk (after the really great keynote that others on PlanetEclipse already posted about) was about a model-driven build management suite called Storm that is currently developed by Brane. If you ever had the problem, that you want to build your Eclipse distribution customized yourself, then this software might be interesting for you.

The second talk, "Executing BPMN" described the differences between graphical process modeling languages like BPMN and executing languages such as jPDL. Koen Aers, the presenter of this talk, also explained why an overall coverage of BPMN will not be possible in their tool (and is not even necessary as research found out). But he gave a quick preview on the coming modeler that will be distributed in the jBPM release in July and it already looked really nice (alas it is not yet build upon JWT!).

The next track was a set of SOA talks from the STP project: how the policy editor is evolving, what is currently happening around the Enterprise Integration Designer, how one can model SCA composites and how the STP-IM all connects these components has been summarized in short time quite well. Probably the tuturial on Monday has given much more insight, but having four hours is of course much more than only one.

Another track of this day was about an EMF repository, workflow and model execution. Actually, it have been three different talks: the first one was about EMFStore, a project some colleagues from the TU Munich presented and which was integrated in their tool suite Unicase. Alas, I didn't find the time to talk to them, but they said that they will have a poster at the poster session tomorrow, so I'm already looking forward to that. The second presenter was Bryan Hunt who gave a quick introduction into the MWE project and how the classes he has designed work together. The third one in this track was from the HU Berlin (so a lot of German Ph.D. students here!) and presented a framework for the execution of models. He demonstrated it on a C# interpreter where the dynamic behavior was actually modeled with his toolset(building on OCL and UML State diagrams). It reminded me a little bit at Executable UML (xUML), but I didn't have the time to look further into the differences between both.

In the end I got a good impression how the next major release, Galileo, is currently build using model-driven development tools: model-to-model transformations (QVTO) and model-to-text-transformations (XPand) are used in order to assemble and build all the milestone builds for Galileo. So, it seems to me that more and more areas are open to modeling and I'm already looking forward to the talks on this topic tomorrow.

Latest findings of the CAOS Report 2008

No, this is not a new version of the CHAOS Report of the Standish Group which reports about how many IT projects failed in the last year again. This is about a report concerning the Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) which the 451 group created last year and which Matt Aslett introduced us yesterday at the Eclipse Annual Member Meeting.

Hmm, if one only looked at the number of attendees, it seems that the Eclipse community is getting smaller, as only about 40 people attended the member meeting. But this is probably due to several really interesting tutorials that were part of EclipseCon and that happened at the same time. All in all there are about 1,000 people here at EclipseCon, so the community is much bigger!

So what did the CAOS report contain? The title of the presentation was "Open Source is not a business model". And as Matt finished, "Open Source is a business tactics, not a business model".
They had a look at 114 companies and investigated their business strategies. These were categorized in 4 categories:
- license choice
- development model
- vendor licensing strategy
- reveneue trigger.

Already the first category, the license choice, offered some quite interesting insights: most of these companies (51,8%!) use the GPLv2. All in all the usage of GPL and LGPL covered 72,8 % of all companies. The Eclipse Public License (EPL) for example is only used by 6,1 %! With probably hundreds of different open source licenses around, only 10 are mainly used!

Interesting was also the revenue triggers: many companies probably started their open source strategy with offering service and support for money. In the meanwhile this is only 7,9 % of how revenue is achieved. Mostly these companies make money by subscriptions(34,2%) and commercial licenses (24,6%).

There were a lot of more interesting things that were mentioned, but I guess this short summary shows already that this report might be interesting for you!

Oh yes, as we already have a look at different numbers, I might add some more statistics that different people from the Eclipse Foundation explained at the Annual Member Meeting: the Eclipse Foundation currently has 172 members and 901 different committers from at least 75 organizations! Wow, that's not bad!
There are approximatelly 1 million downloads each month of the different Eclipse releases whereas 26% of all downloads come from China! A huge number! Of all downloads 34% were the IDE for JEE and 22% the IDE for Java. So, Eclipse is still mostly important for developing Java.
But this will change in the future as the planning for Eclipse version 4.0 (Codename: e4) is already in an advanced state.

Oh, yes, some last numbers: when looking at the European region of Eclipse Germany is with 44% still in front, after that comes France with 16% and Sweden with 8%. As the committers of our JWT project mostly come from Germany and France, this meets perfectly our profile *g*.

Looking forward to EclipseCon - to meet you!

Next week EclipseCon 2009 will already start in Santa Clara, California. I guess most of you will look forward to have the best conference ever. Not only because the huge amount of interesting talks, but also because this is probably the best possibility to meet the persons you always wanted to talk to in person!

It already starts on Monday with quite interesting tutorials such as how to use Mylin, work with Eclipse RCP, apply the latest research results in model transformation, have a dive in the platform resource model or develop your SOA with Eclipse. There are so many tutorials (besides the Eclipse annual member meeting that happens on Monday afternoon, too), that I don't know yet which one to choose.

And it's getting much more difficult once the conference starts on Tuesday! Not only the BOFs will be fun, but of course also the plenty presentations. Since we'll have a talk on Thursday about how to execute a process (by the way, the presentation is nearly finished!), I'm of course interested in what other companies do in this context and am already looking forward to Koen having his talk Executing BPMN.

But besides that a lots of other talks (that are not related with BPM, SOA, Workflows, etc.) seem to be interesting: how to evolve a user community, what will happen in Eclipse e4, the newest development concerning Galileo, newest tools for web development, building and translation as well as others.

I'm sure everybody will find a topic that he's interested in!! And if not, you can still sing Karaoke, watch some posters or talk to exhibitors. And with the long list of presenters, you'll definitely find somebody to talk to!

I'm looking forward to meet you all in the next few days!