ECF 2.0.0

With Ganymede the ECF project has it's 2.0.0 release. As for what's new....there were many little things, as well as many big but invisible things (i.e. APIs), but the things that really stand out for me are

• Real-time shared editing (with a quickly-becoming popular video)
• Discovery API: Simplified API and added jSLP provider
• Remote OSGi Services API: Added provider based upon r-OSGi
• P2: ECF's asynchronous file transfer API is used for P2's multi-protocol download, and so is part of the SDK.
• Community Growth: We added some great new committers to the project: Markus, Jan, Ted, Mustafa, Marcelo...as well as many more contributors.
• New and Noteworthy for details and more

This is ECF's last release as a technology project...as we will soon be moving to the new Runtime top-level project for 2.1 and beyond.

I like to say: 'the community is the team' :)...so congratulations and thanks to the ECF community.

P.S. You can find/install ECF's features in the Ganymede Communications category.

Adding Shared Editing To Your Favorite Text Editor

With ECF 2.0/Ganymede, ECF introduces Real-Time Shared Editing. By default, the ECF real-time shared editing capability has been added to the JDT Java Source Code editor and Eclipse's Default Text Editor.

I've begun documenting how those with other types of Eclipse-based text editors (e.g. C/C++, php, javascript, xml editors, etc) can add real-time shared editing to their editors...simply by adding a little bit of markup to plugin.xml. See here for explanation and example.

Articles on ECF

There are now a couple of articles on Eclipse Communication Framework for version 2.0.0/Ganymede release:

InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/eclipse-ganymede-ecf
DZone Interview: http://java.dzone.com/news/the-ecf-project-an-interview-w

Eclipse and Volunteerism

In response to a recent news thread, Bjorn Freeman-Benson says

As Dan Ariely explains in "Predictably Irrational", there is a huge difference between real volunteer and paid volunteer (Eclipse is 'paid volunteer').

I want to examine briefly Bjorn's assertion that Eclipse is 'paid volunteer'.

In looking at the Dash commit count sorted by # of commits, the thing that jumps out at me is that for 2008 individuals, are right after IBM in terms of # of active committers (23.56%), commits (159,279), and lines of code (4,982,101).

There are/should be many qualifiers for these data: I'm sure many of the independents are paid to work on Eclipse...but conversely it's quite possible (and likely, I think) that some corporate-supported committers work more on Eclipse-related work...by their own choice...than their employers explicitly sanction. But in any event, I think the overwhelming message from the data is that the contribution from independents (many of whom are unpaid volunteers I would suppose) is large...and growing rapidly year-over-year.

All I'm saying is that 'Eclipse' is not necessarily 'paid volunteer'. But it does have a strong aspect of unpaid volunteerism, which as Bjorn (and Eric Rizzo) point out, should be encouraged and supported:

The place that Eclipse overall has not done a good job is making our projects attractive to unpaid, part-time volunteers. They're different. Their motivations are different. The Rizzo Ceiling is real for them.

For some pointers to interesting thoughts about motivations, please see

When Self Interest Isn't Everything

Seems that while I was typing this out, Boris Bokowski has also made some similar points.