2009 Eclipse Board of Directors

You have probably seen Mike's email - the elections for committer representatives for the Eclipse Board of Directors is now open.

Rather than explaining why you should vote for me :-), I thought it would be useful to summarize the key election facts:

• You are voting for a one-year term starting April 2009. Voting is open as of today, for three weeks until March 13, 3 pm Eastern time. Check out the committer candidates and their vision statements.
• To vote, check the email you received from emo@eclipse.org on Feb 20, 2009. It contains the URL for voting, as well as the required voting password.
• The Board will have 24 directors, as follows:
  • Sixteen directors for the strategic members, one seat per member.
  • Four directors from "sustaining members". There are nine candidates, and sustaining members (companies) get to vote. This is the old "add-in providers" category but generalized to include "enterprise members" in the future.
  • Four directors representing the committers. There are six committer candidates.
    
• Each committer has one vote. Here are some important details:
  • Committers who are employed by a member company can go ahead and vote. Note though that all votes from one company will be collapsed into a single vote.
  • Individual committers, if they have not done so yet, must sign a membership agreement in order to be able to vote. To understand why this is required, read this page, then read this page to make sure you fill out the form correctly. No voting privileges without signing the form!
• In previous years, turnout was pretty low - for example in 2008, only 148 of about 1,000 committers cast their vote. More votes will add weight to the positions of the committer representatives, so please vote now!
  
• There is more than one Eclipse Board of Directors, so be careful not to confuse the different board elections. ;-)

Eclipse in the Cloud

About a year ago, at EclipseCon, we showed a demo of how the Eclipse IDE could look like if it was browser-based, talking to an Eclipse server "in the cloud". The reactions were lukewarm: "Looks cool, but why would I want to run an IDE in a browser?" "I have yet to see web enabled IDEs as an industry trend".

This industry trend is now starting to happen.

On Thursday, Mozilla and their new developer tools lab launched Bespin, an "experiment proposing an open, extensible web-based framework for code editing". Within a few days, 30,000 people logged into their public server, 400 people joined their discussion group, about 50 bugs were filed, several of them with patches, and many articles, blogs and even a Wikipedia entry were written. Congratulations, Ben and Dion of Mozilla (and Ajaxian fame), on the successful launch!

We looked at Bespin and asked, wouldn't it be great if Eclipse could play in this space too? Wouldn't it be cool if we could implement a Bespin server using Eclipse plug-ins that already exist?

Well... that Eclipse-based Bespin server is available now, after two days of development!

Simon Kaegi and I locked ourselves into a room and just implemented it. Today, we are declaring success, and are sharing the code as part of the e4 project with anyone interested. If you would like to give it a spin, check out this wiki page.

The Eclipse IDE, as you know it, is an OSGi-based application, and is built entirely out of components (called plug-ins or bundles). Many of these components can run headless, on a server, such as the underlying resource model, the incremental Java compiler, etc. Using the headless components, it was very easy to implement the Bespin client-server API. Like Mozilla's Bespin server, our server supports browsing files and folders, and editing files. In addition to that, we implemented extra features such as showing compile errors and warnings, and checking out projects from CVS servers using anonymous CVS.

Bespin already shows a lot of promise at this early stage. It consists of a surprisingly fast code editor written in JavaScript using Canvas, a file browser, and an emacs-like command line interface for issuing commands. There are two backend implementations provided by Mozilla, one in Python, and one in Java, and the browser-based client talks to the server using a RESTy API. Here is how it looks like:

If you would like to play with the Eclipse Bespin server, or work with us on it, check our wiki page. If there are any questions, hop on IRC, where we can be found on #eclipse-e4/irc.freenode.net or #bespin/irc.mozilla.org as borisb6i and skaegi.

P.S. Mozilla has a cool-looking and fast client, and Eclipse has a lot of experience with IDE features, and good amounts of code that can run headless. Sounds like a great opportunity for collaboration, doesn't it? Well, thanks to Mike and the Eclipse Foundation who organized it, and Dion and Ben who are investing their time and some of Mozilla's travel money, we will have an in-person meeting on Thursday, in Ottawa, to talk about this. These guys are moving fast!

Bundle Marketplace: +1

I fully agree with Gorkem Erkan that the Eclipse community should seriously consider building a bundle marketplace. In fact, I recently had the same idea (independently) as you can see here on Twitter.

In the Eclipse context, that bundle marketplace would probably consist of multiple overlapping sub-markets... with every Eclipse-based application defining a sub-market. For example, bundles that work with the Eclipse IDE, bundles that work with the Flex IDE, or the SAP IDE, or with IBM's Rational tools such as Team Concert. Also, at the RCP level, vendors could offer a basic application for free and offer upgrades as additional for-pay bundles.

I think this an exciting idea. What do we need to do to make it happen? Would the Eclipse Board of Directors support this? Which members of the Eclipse community (other than Kent Beck ;-) ) would benefit the most, short-term?

Looking forward to your comments.