developerWorks Interviews: John Kellerman, Part 2 Manager of Eclipse strategy at IBM 5-24-06 KELLERMAN: There's a company called Compass Group in southern Africa. They developed an application to do budgeting and forecasting. They had three months to get it up and running. They worked with a company called Jigsaw as an IT provider. When they evaluated the technology, again, they liked what they got in terms of the base technology Eclipse. Cross-platform support and the update mechanism. So as the users for this application are distributed, as you can imagine, bandwidth in southern Africa can be a problem. And when they need to update, to update the application, they just touch one or more of the plug-ins, put them on a shared update site and then the application, the clients pull them down when they need to. There was the city of Stuttgart, Germany worked with a software provider called iMedic to implement, I believe it was an application for IT purchasing, that was it. And they had an ad hoc system prior to that that took three to four weeks to process, and when they finished this system they reduced that processing time from three to four weeks to two to three days. And beyond that, if you just consider all the commercial Eclipse-based products that are out there, tools, add-ons, there are literally hundreds of them. Again they're listed as well, linked to from the communities page at Eclipse.org. LANINGHAM: You hear sometimes people in the financial world talk about the power of geometric progression. And in a way that kind of applies to an activity that's taking place in a community environment like this, doesn't it? KELLERMAN: It is. It's growth. It's that kind of, you know, without overstating, but exponential growth, right? It's feeding on itself. LANINGHAM: What about any other news from Eclipse-Con. You mentioned that took place in March in Santa Clara. Anything else that you should bring up about that event? KELLERMAN: Well, it was -- the first year -- we ran our first Eclipse-Con in 2004. We sold that one out and had 634, I think, attendees. We got a little bit bigger venue last year and sold it out at about a thousand and change attendees, and that's why we went to the Santa Clara Convention Center this year, so that we could accommodate everybody. As it turns out, we sold it out this year as well. Registration -- we had to turn them off. We -- now I am speaking, I should say the Eclipse Foundation had to turn those registrations off a week, half a week or so before the conference started, and our final attendee count was 1400 and change. That was exciting to see that continued growth. So IBM announced that we are going to be piloting a support offering for Eclipse, as we look out to, for example, our Rational customers. We see that in a given shop, what the programmers are working on, they may have a chunk of them using Rational Software Modeler. They may have another chunk of their programmers using WebSphere Integration Developer. They may also have a chunk of programmers just simply using Eclipse and Java IDE building plain old Java objects. They look to IBM and want to come to us to provide not only the tools but also the support for their whole IT shop. That's why we're piloting the support offering so that folks using Eclipse as an IDE can get support from IBM. And we certainly -- and this is leveraging the skills, the expertise, the leadership we have within the Eclipse open source projects. We also announced that we're continuing this year the innovation grants, the IBM innovation grants. These started back in 2003. These are grants of between 10 and $30,000 for selected universities and researchers focusing on technology areas that are important to IBM. So, of course, Eclipse is there. And this year the technology areas have grown. So, for example, I believe Derby is there. Perhaps Geronimo as well. We announced Rational Rate Architect is in beta now based on Eclipse for data architects, data modelers to view and manage their data resources, design databases. We have a forms designer from Lotus currently in beta. Makes it easy to visually create XMLE forms for automating business processes. LANINGHAM: Lot of great stuff. You know, you started to lead into this, but what does the future hold for Eclipse? Where do you see it going here in the short and mid-term? KELLERMAN: That's a tough question. So if we look at -- you know I suppose we could extrapolate current trends. So I think what we see, the obvious thing is growth, and none of us see that growth diminishing. So I think now if we consider areas of growth, what we'll see Eclipse continue to grow as a base for rich client application. That's just starting now and that's going to continue to explode. I think we'll see -- we have Eclipse and the Java ID today, project for C and C plus plus and a little bit, not quite as far along, projects for Cobalt and 4Tran. We've recently seen additions of PHP. I think we'll see Eclipse, we'll see those things continue to mature and Eclipse branch out in terms of coverage across languages. I think the other interesting aspect here is as Microsoft solidifies Vista and that comes on line, programmers and developers have vision. Do they move from their Win32 APIs to Vista APIs and work with a Vista-only solution or do they use this discontinuity to move to Eclipse and get a Windows, Mac and Linux solution? I think we'll see some of that. So growth I think is the key thing and we'll look forward to it. O'Connell: John, you mentioned growing pains before. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about what those growing pains were, how you addressed them or how the community addressed those growing pains and what sort of growing pains you see today in going forward. KELLERMAN: Right, so when I was talking, when I mentioned growing pains previously, when we started the original open source project, we had a collaboration that was responsible for collaboration of industry leaders that was responsible for promoting and supporting that open source project. And that's what -- that was the original Eclipse consortium. And as other companies came on board as members to the Eclipse consortium, that's where we experienced growing pains. Just managing that as a business. And so I had mentioned collecting and disbursing funds, doing marketing work, securing legal counsel. You can imagine running a board meeting with 70 members. It just was -- it was becoming unwieldy. So at the same time we knew that there were remained some key industry leaders sitting on the sideline, because IBM still -- they felt IBM was still in control. Right? It wasn't really independent. So what we did was just that, seek to make it independent. We worked over about a year and just prior to Eclipse-Con in 2004 announced the formation of the Eclipse Foundation, Inc., a not for profit entity with a board of directors, classes of membership. Annual dues. And those annual dues then, the executive director, which is appointed by the board, are used to fund a staff. And so this enabled that next level, that next round of growth, some key providers that have been sitting on the sideline came on board, joined allowed us better by having a full-time staff, allowed us to better manage -- manage the business. That was in 2004. It's continued to grow. We have -- I don't recall the exact count. I know it's over 100 members. It's between 15 and 20 strategic members, which strategic member's one that contributes significant resources, both monetary, both financial and people resources, to the open source project. So then what growing pain do we see now? I think we see -- I think it's fair to say that if you look at the growth in the number of open source projects at Eclipse, and the members, right, that creates management -- that creates challenges in both management and business operations to handle that growth, to deal with the requests and intellectual property checking that we need to do. And so that's, I think, you know in the near term, the next set of challenges that we as members in the Eclipse Foundation is going to have to work through is you know refining infrastructure, refining business processes to operate the business in the most efficient manner. O'Connell: Really insightful information to have that context and history from you, John. I appreciate it. One final question I'd like you to address for the listeners, those listeners who haven't yet experienced or used Eclipse, if you have any specific suggestions on first few steps they might want to take to better understand and perhaps get their feet wet with it. KELLERMAN: Well, so first use steps. Of course, you need a Java runtime environment of JRE. You probably have one. If you don't, you can get one from IBM developerWorks or you can get one from Sun. You'll need to download Eclipse. Real easy, go to eclipse.org click on downloads, and grab the mirror and off you go. What you want is the platform. And I find the simplest way to learn Eclipse is to use the Java ID, develop a simple Java program. So I'd recommend getting two books, get your favorite introduction to Java; or, you know, if you're an experienced Java programmer, find a good problem to solve and then get a good intro book to Eclipse. I'm a bit biased to one entitled "The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse." I'd recommend you start there it's got a CD and great examples. Partly because I helped write it. There are other excellent books as well. So that's in a nutshell, get Eclipse. Find an interesting programming problem in Java to tackle and get a good book that will help you navigate through setting up a project and using the ID and Java editor and off you go. O'Connell: You make it sound pretty simple, John. I know there's more books coming out every day on Eclipse. KELLERMAN: There are. It's great to see. LANINGHAM: John. Sounds like a neat journey for you too, your part in all this? KELLERMAN: It has. As I said, I started in late '99. So it's over six years ago that I've been working on this. And it's far and away the longest job, the longest tenure I've had in a job in IBM. And that's because it's each year it's a different job. Each year there's a new set of challenges and new set of things to work on and it's been an absolute blast. LANINGHAM: It's been a great discussion, John. We appreciate the perspective you bring to this and also the help in guiding people to some first steps they can take. We hope you'll come back, maybe, and join us again as this story unfolds for another chat some time. KELLERMAN: I'd love to. LANINGHAM: Michael, we should mention that anyone interested in learning more about Eclipse and using it can find a wealth of information about Eclipse on the developerWorks website at ibm.com/developerworks. That's ibm.com/developerworks. Click on open source and projects in the left Nav and you'll find Eclipse listed as one of the top projects at the top of that page. You'll find links to articles, tutorials, downloads, forums and other helpful Eclipse focused content. It's really a rich area of the developerWorks site. O'CONNELL: For example, right now we have the top story talking about, top story introducing folks to the Eclipse-embedded rich client platform, or ERCP -- don't use the acronym -- and we also have every week we have new content, new articles and tutorials, and we continue to point you to the latest in tools as well. LANINGHAM: There will be plenty more to come. And we'll have editors from that zone on to talk with us on the other program, I'm sure, off and on as well. O'CONNELL: Another item highlighted on the Eclipse area this week is the getting started with Eclipse framework article, helps you learn the basic ideas on how you can help create communication-based aps on Eclipse. LANINGHAM: That's on the same page, right, on the projects page on open source in the left Nav. O'CONNELL: That's a just a couple of examples. We add stuff every week. If you want to keep tabs on it, you can sign up for the RSS feed and have that information come to you every time we have a new item for you to check out. LANINGHAM: Great. So that's it for today. Michael, thanks for your time as well. It's always a pleasure. O'CONNELL: Likewise, Scott. Thank you. LANINGHAM: I'm Scott Laningham for developerWorks. Talk to you next week..