Eclipse Board Elections voting opens
, February 25th, 2008Voting is now open and it’s time for Eclipse committers to cast their votes. The list of nominees is an impressive collection of people whose passion has been making a big difference in Eclipse, so we should be in good hands for the coming year. Last year the committer representative list was dominated by IBMers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing and IBM’s contribution to Eclipse continues to be key in bringing us the amazing platform that we work with today. One thing that’s interesting about this year’s election is that Equinox guru Jeff McCaffer and I represent small Eclipse-based startups. I see this as a very good thing because innovation is critical to the continued evolution of Eclipse, and startups are a great mechanism for driving innovation. My vision statement is focused on tool support to make committers’ lives easier:
I have been an Eclipse committer since early 2002 when I co-created the AspectJ project. Like many others at the time, I was hedging my bets and developing extensions for multiple IDEs. But after a few weeks of experience building on it, it became clear to me that Eclipse was going to be the platform for innovation in the tools space. At that time I based this judgment almost entirely on the modularity and openness of the Platform. Since then, I have learned a lot about the critical part that collaboration tools and community involvement play in fostering a successful ecosystem. If elected, in addition to fulfilling the usual obligations of Committer Representative, my first priority will be evolving the tool support that facilitates collaboration in our community, and my second priority will be helping committers improve the cross-project usability of the tools that we produce.
Being an Eclipse committer is a challenging task, due to the amount of input that comes in through project planning and community channels. In addition, the Eclipse frameworks that we work with daily add up to millions of lines of code. As an Eclipse committer, one of my motivations for creating and contributing Mylyn was to facilitate development and collaboration within the Eclipse ecosystem. To date Mylyn has been successful at enabling many committers to work more productively on their projects and to process much more community feedback than was previously possible. This has been a key factor in the success of the Mylyn project to date, since it has enabled a small number of committers to resolve thousands of bug reports.
The Eclipse Foundation has been doing an amazing job in providing the infrastructure and web services that are the backbone of our community. As Committer Representative I plan on coordinating improvements to the tool support that we use to make us more productive when using these services. Key areas I see for improvement include:
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Better integrating Eclipse.org facilities for committers, including bugs.eclipse.org and IPZilla integration with the IDE. We spend a large portion of our time using these repositories, and the easier it is for us to use them within Eclipse the more productive we become. |
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Ensuring that there is an EPP distribution that supports committers and contributors. This used to be the Eclipse Classic download, but thanks to innovation within Eclipse there is an increasing number of other projects and tools that are now relevant to committers. |
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Coordinating additional tool support for facilitating Eclipse project development. This can include things such as include IRC integration from ECF, easier applying of patches and sharing of Mylyn contexts, as well as default configurations for PDE’s API Tools. |
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Improving the user community feedback channels. This includes better integrated support for bug reporting (e.g. EPP distribution specific reporting) and usage monitoring. |
While I have put some effort into each of these areas already, as Committer Representative I will drive additional progress via contributions, getting help from the Eclipse Foundation and coordination of community resources (e.g. a summer of code project on improving tool support for committers).
February 25th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Couldn’t resist on that “read more” link. Given your company motto it should have been “read less”. The whole blog post is also rather more then less. Oh, well, sometimes more is less too, if you know what I mean.
Anyways, good luck with the election.
February 25th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
> Couldn’t resist on that “read more” link. Given your company motto it should have
> been “read less”. The whole blog post is also rather more then less.
Ah, but this is where our version of “less is more” differs considerably from others in the industry. Consider Apple for example. Their aesthetic sense is amazing, and makes for very clean and elegant interfaces hardware that are free of superfluous buttons and features. Or consider some of the more slick Web 2.0 apps, which have a very simple and clean look. But there is a problem with approaches that put excess emphasis on the “less” aspect of UI form, since that can neglect UI function. Such UIs make us click a more, scroll more, and need to flip through more screens to get something simple done.
A key part of our “less is more” motto is less clicks. In other words, minimizing the number of mouse clicks to get the information you need in front of you. This was quite literally my thought process when I was wondering whether or not to inline the main portion of my vision statement into the blog entry, since it would mean that people could decide whether they cared or not without clicking out of their feed aggregator or RSS reader. This tradeoff between inlining and linking in content is always tricky. If everything was built on Eclipse and the Task-Focused Interface it would be easier because we would have more UI consistency and ease of navigation, but we’re not quite there yet.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Not sure how the Apple analogy is related to my comment, but reiterating on the blog post: it required 1.5 screens of scrolling and 9 additional clicks to get information you’re writing about.
February 27th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Wow, 9 is a lot of clicks. I was hoping that most people wouldn’t need to click at all, and that those interested in reading more would just click the single “Read More…” link at the end. I will continue to try to improve at maintaining a high information density and clear link structure in future posts.