Help EclipseRT Help You

EclipseCon 2013 Starts next week, and from my twitter feed it seems the Eclipse community has already started their pilgrimage to Boston.

While many people know Eclipse as a great IDE, did you know Eclipse also provides a powerful software stack to build enterprise applications on? From Modularity to Java Persistence to a world class Webserver, Eclipse is showing up in places you’d never expect – including the International Space Station.

While the technology is certainly world class, getting started can be daunting. Unlike the Eclipse IDE, the RT projects don’t provide an integrated solution that you can simply download and start. Are we failing the community because of this? Could we do better? Should EclipseRT projects work towards a common goal or is it just a useful organizational construct for projects that would otherwise have no home under the existing Eclipse structure? Is there a business model for this, or should that not matter? To answer these questions, we’ve assembled an RT Panel with several PMC members.

Tom Watson, Glyn Normington, Gunnar Wagenkncht, Markus Knauer, Pascal Rapicault, Doug Clarke and Mike Millinkovich will be discussing these questions on Tuesday afternoon (5:00 pm). I’ve prepared some material to get things started, however, I would really like to hear from the community. Do you have questions for the panelists? What are your thoughts on the structure of EclipseRT? Does the simultaneous release make sense or should RT be moving in a different direction? Please feel free to leave a comment here, or better yet, come to the panel and ask your questions there.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in Boston!