SDA India : India’s Enterprise IT, IT Business, IT Services & Management

Interviews

Back to Interviews | Printer friendly | Comment

Chris Aniszczyk is the Eclipse Committer for three Eclipse projects: Plug-in Development Environment (PDE), Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF), and Eclipse Modeling Framework Technologies (EMFT). SDA India spoke to Chris Aniszczyk to better understand the contributions and impact of his contributions to the community, and will continue to make, to the Eclipse ecosystem as a whole.

Chris is an Eclipse committer at IBM Lotus who focuses on OSGi-related development. His primary focus these days is improving Eclipse\'s Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) and spreading the Eclipse love inside of IBM\'s Lotus organization. Chris lives and breathes Eclipse through evangelizing about Eclipse in his blog (and various other publications). He also regularly attends conferences and universities to give presentations about Eclipse.

SDA: Many of the Eclipse users and committers today feel that the Eclipse community wouldn’t be the same with out you. When did your interest in Eclipse start? Tell us about your first involvement with the community.

Chris Aniszczyk (CA): My interest in Eclipse started a few years ago during my graduate studies. I used a variety of tools back then but it was the amazing Java Development Tools (JDT) that really hooked me into Eclipse. Incremental compiling goes a long way for a person who used to use just VIM, Ant and GNU Screen.

My first involvement with the community was as a normal (and clueless) community member just looking for some help on the EMF newsgroups. It was through that newsgroup and particularly Ed Merks’ responsiveness that convinced me that Eclipse has something going for it in terms of community relations. I mean, you post a question and within an hour, you had a response from Ed with an answer, how cool is that?

On the whole, I feel incredibly honored being recognized as the top ambassador for Eclipse this year especially considering the wonderful and outspoken Eclipse community.

SDA: Deciding what your current role in Eclipse is quite a task, you seem to be involved with everything! So how would you define your work Eclipse?

CA: Through my job at IBM and previous college studies, I got to work with a lot of the Eclipse projects out there. I’ve worked with EMF, GEF, PDE, GMF, TPTP, BIRT, eRCP, ECF and a few more. I tend to define my role within Eclipse as someone who has had a taste of many Eclipse technologies and just enjoys sharing the knowledge with everyone. I have written over 15 articles on various Eclipse technologies and spoke at various conferences… call me an ambassador, evangelist or a charlatan if you like

In the end, the ability to interact with a responsive community through my blog, IRC (IRC, nickname: zx) and the newsgroups fuels my thirst to share knowledge.

Chris Aniszcyk, Top Ambassador for Eclipse

SDA: One of the things that you are deeply involved with is the PDE project. Can you throw some more light on that?

CA: I’ll keep it simple; the PDE team is the brightest (and most laid back) team I have ever worked with. The ability to crank out quality code and tell jokes while doing it can go a long way. The PDE team is a natural fit for me due to its motto, “we do tooling, but our business is people.”

At JAX India 2007, Chris Aniszczyk will talk about the typical eRCP application development process: (a) Building a simple application (b) Testing on a win32 runtime (c) Deploying on a device (and desktop!). He will be joined in the session by Wassim Melhem, the PDE component lead for the Eclipse Platform project. There will be discussions of the application and architecture model before we start a simple coding exercise to familiarize non-RCP developers with the RCP model.

Attend Chris’ talk and gain a good understanding of the embedded Rich Client Platform and how to leverage the embedded Rich Client Platform in their applications. For those of you who'd like to get involved with the project, Chris and Wassim will also tell you how you can get involved in the embedded Rich Client Platform community.

SDA: What’s new from the PDE team for Eclipse 3.3 M6?

CA: The 3.3 release for PDE in general has been amazing with the improvement in our editors (hyper-linking, code assist, and improved error detection). However, the 3.3M6 release for PDE has primarily been focused on stability. We did modify the product editor to include a new page dedicated to splash screen work. The new splash page also includes a section with canned templates to make it easier for our users to use the new splash screen enhancements out of Platform UI.

SDA: You will be giving a talk in Eclipse Forum India in May. What is your opinion about in interest in Indian market for Eclipse? Is there much interest as much as adoption?

CA: I personally think it’s great that India has an interest in Eclipse. I have written many articles on the various Eclipse projects and a lot of the responses and questions I’ve received have come from the Indian Eclipse community. More importantly, the PDE team is always looking for new locations for our various fan clubs. India sounds great!

SDA: Eclipse has of course grown both in its adoption and popularity over the past years. No tool/platform can however be perfect. What are the top 5 pain points, or issues with Eclipse that you find?

“Seamless” Integration: With so many projects and components now, we need to pay special attention now how these components should be integrated. In the Europa release, we are finding that some projects aren’t being good Eclipse citizens by say contributing many entries to the toolbar.

Consistency and Component Reuse: The beauty of Eclipse is that it allows each project to live on its own island. However, being on an island means that you may not be aware of what other projects are doing and how to reuse their work.

Provisioning: I don’t have to explain this one much. The Eclipse update and provisioning story needs to improve in the near future if Eclipse is going to continue its growth.

Quality: Eclipse is growing quickly and there needs to be emphasis on ensuring that the quality that made Eclipse successful in the first place will be represented across all projects.

Information Overload: There are so many projects and code in the Eclipse community that it’s hard to find reusable code sometimes. For example, it’s better to look at the DTP project if your Eclipse-based application needs to work with databases instead of crafting your own custom solution. However, knowing that DTP can help you is a challenge. The ability to easily find projects you can leverage within Eclipse is critical for the future growth of Eclipse.

SDA: Eclipse greatly simplifies plug-in development. If you could recommend one plug-in or one feature that everyone should use, what would that be?

CA: This is tough! I used a variety of awesome plug-ins depending on the situation. One thing I couldn’t live without is the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+E. I hate to use the mouse and Ctrl+E brings about everything anyone can ask for in Eclipse at your fingertips. Also, it would be a shame not to mention JDT, without JDT there would be no Eclipse.

SDA: You have also been elected as a Committer Representative in the Eclipse Board of Directors. What are your plans for the future with Eclipse?

CA: First off, I’m honored to represent the Eclipse committers on the Board of Directors. It’s my opinion that Eclipse committers represent the top echelon of software engineers in the industry and I’m proud to represent them. However, being a board member doesn’t let me plan out Eclipse’s future per se. It gives me the right (along with the other committer representatives) to influence the direction Eclipse heads in. My personal goals as a committer representative is to make sure our activities are as transparent as possible. To help with that, the committer representatives have started a blog (http://eclipse-committer-reps.blogspot.com/) and created a newsgroup (news://news.eclipse.org/eclipse.board.committer.reps) to facilitate discussion amongst committers and the representatives. In the end, I’m really looking forward to represent the perspective of committers on the board.

What is JAX India 2007?

Produced by SDA India Magazine and sda-india.com, JAX India 2007 is modeled on the lines as the hugely successful JAX series of conferences and events produced annually by the S&S Media group, across Europe and South East Asia. This year, the world-class conference comes to Bangalore, to provide the highly skilled Indian audience a chance to meet and interact with the most renowned speakers from the US, Europe, and rest of the world.

JAX India 2007 offers attendees a three-fold conference experience: participants, exhibitors and sponsors are presented with the opportunity to profit from the unique melding of the conferences JAX India 2007, Enterprise Architecture India 2007 and Eclipse Forum India 2007. Need more reasons?

Strong selection of industry experts from North America, Europe, Asia Pacific
Over 60 sessions, including focused full day/half day power workshop
Cutting-edge content guaranteed to provide you fresh impetus at work
Real-world business advice from Enterprise IT decision makers
Unique opportunity to attend three conferences (JAX, Eclipse Forum, Enterprise Architecture) for the price of one
Gather first-hand information about new vendor products and services at the joint expo

Important Dates