EclipseCon NA is just around the corner and I know many of you speakers are busy as bees polishing your presentation ; and even if you don’t speak, you are probably already starting to prepare your schedule and make the final travel arrangements.
While we are of course open to all the cool ideas you may have and that you think would be interesting for a crowd of open-source and Eclipse aficionados, we are especially looking for submissions on the following themes:
Eclipse in the Industry – We all know that Eclipse is a great platform for building industry solutions. Whether you are doing modeling, OSGi, embedded, … I am sure you have feedback to share about deploying Eclipse, and open-source technologies in the context of automotive, aerospace, …
Community and business models – The European ecosystem is flourishing of individuals and companies who use open-source on a daily basis to build real-life applications. Come and share your experience in establishing business models for open-source based software, and creating a sound community of adopters and contributors to your technology.
Mobile and Web Development – With the (not-so) recent Javascript renaissance, and the always growing ecosystem of web and mobile frameworks, we thought it would be worth a dedicated track. Therefore, we are really looking forward to hearing what you have to share when it comes to using Eclipse in this context.
We are trying a new format for tutorials this year. We want them to be advanced sessions, where participants who already know about a given technology can learn more advanced techniques, with specific usecases in mind.
Workshops are 2-hours long, so you really want to work on making a sharp proposal that will convince the Programm Committee your talk will be giving the most to its participants! 🙂
So don’t wait any longer, and submit a talk –or several!– NOW!
EclipseCon NA is just around the corner and I know many of you speakers are busy as bees polishing your presentation ; and even if you don’t speak, you are probably already starting to prepare your schedule and make the final travel arrangements.
While we are of course open to all the cool ideas you may have and that you think would be interesting for a crowd of open-source and Eclipse aficionados, we are especially looking for submissions on the following themes:
Eclipse in the Industry – We all know that Eclipse is a great platform for building industry solutions. Whether you are doing modeling, OSGi, embedded, … I am sure you have feedback to share about deploying Eclipse, and open-source technologies in the context of automotive, aerospace, …
Community and business models – The European ecosystem is flourishing of individuals and companies who use open-source on a daily basis to build real-life applications. Come and share your experience in establishing business models for open-source based software, and creating a sound community of adopters and contributors to your technology.
Mobile and Web Development – With the (not-so) recent Javascript renaissance, and the always growing ecosystem of web and mobile frameworks, we thought it would be worth a dedicated track. Therefore, we are really looking forward to hearing what you have to share when it comes to using Eclipse in this context.
We are trying a new format for tutorials this year. We want them to be advanced sessions, where participants who already know about a given technology can learn more advanced techniques, with specific usecases in mind.
Workshops are 2-hours long, so you really want to work on making a sharp proposal that will convince the Programm Committee your talk will be giving the most to its participants! 🙂
So don’t wait any longer, and submit a talk –or several!– NOW!
EclipseCon is in about a month, and we are so excited about what’s cooking for M2M this year!
Today, we contributed Mihini source code, after an initial review that took longer than what we initally planned, and EclipseCon in Boston will be the first opportunity for you to get a real deep dive into the Eclipse Koneki and Mihini projects.
Over the last few months, we have been working on putting together a nice setup showcasing the software components we are developing for doing M2M at Eclipse, and if you join our tutorial, you will have a chance to recreate something very similar by yourself (minus the actual greenhouse…)!
What is even cooler, is that you’ll get to leave the session with the very same hardware you’ll have hacked with during three hours! That is:
a fully functional Raspberry Pi, with its SD card and a Wi-Fi dongle,
an Arduino Uno, with different kind of sensors (light sensor, push buttons, potentiometers) and actuators (LEDs, ), …
Why is it cool?
Well, first, you willl leave the tutorial with a fully functional code allowing you to interact with physical sensors, making their values available on the Internet for you to just use it.
Then, all this hardware you’ll get, is highly repurposable. The Raspberry Pi, for example, is a pretty powerful Linux board that can act as a media-center, a VoIP server, a web server, etc. The Arduino is a prototyping platform that can be extended in many ways, and the kit you’ll have can be the initial seed for your next DIY project!
What do I have to do?
If you are already registered for EclipseCon, you will soon receive an e-mail for changing your reservation and paying the extra amount of money for getting the hardware. If you are not, then make sure to indicate whether or not you want to pay for the hardware when you register to the conference and tutorial. Please make sure to place your order before March 13!
Note that buying a kit is absolutely not a prerequisite, and we will lend you one for the duration of the tutorial if you didn’t want or didn’t have time to order one for yourself.
Finally, if you are already in Boston on Sunday, 24th, we will welcome you at the Code Sprint session if you feel like you want to hack with us and have a sneak peek at the tutorial!
EclipseCon is in about a month, and we are so excited about what’s cooking for M2M this year!
Today, we contributed Mihini source code, after an initial review that took longer than what we initally planned, and EclipseCon in Boston will be the first opportunity for you to get a real deep dive into the Eclipse Koneki and Mihini projects.
Over the last few months, we have been working on putting together a nice setup showcasing the software components we are developing for doing M2M at Eclipse, and if you join our tutorial, you will have a chance to recreate something very similar by yourself (minus the actual greenhouse…)!
What is even cooler, is that you’ll get to leave the session with the very same hardware you’ll have hacked with during three hours! That is:
a fully functional Raspberry Pi, with its SD card and a Wi-Fi dongle,
an Arduino Uno, with different kind of sensors (light sensor, push buttons, potentiometers) and actuators (LEDs, ), …
Why is it cool?
Well, first, you willl leave the tutorial with a fully functional code allowing you to interact with physical sensors, making their values available on the Internet for you to just use it.
Then, all this hardware you’ll get, is highly repurposable. The Raspberry Pi, for example, is a pretty powerful Linux board that can act as a media-center, a VoIP server, a web server, etc. The Arduino is a prototyping platform that can be extended in many ways, and the kit you’ll have can be the initial seed for your next DIY project!
What do I have to do?
If you are already registered for EclipseCon, you will soon receive an e-mail for changing your reservation and paying the extra amount of money for getting the hardware. If you are not, then make sure to indicate whether or not you want to pay for the hardware when you register to the conference and tutorial. Please make sure to place your order before March 13!
Note that buying a kit is absolutely not a prerequisite, and we will lend you one for the duration of the tutorial if you didn’t want or didn’t have time to order one for yourself.
Finally, if you are already in Boston on Sunday, 24th, we will welcome you at the Code Sprint session if you feel like you want to hack with us and have a sneak peek at the tutorial!
When you run a project at Eclipse, you are very likely interested in getting some indicators regarding the health of your community.
And as Randall Munroe suggests, maybe these indicators will be a good way for you to extrapolate on when your project will actually rule the world 🙂
Download stats
One key indicator is the number of downloads for your deliverables. With Koneki, we have three main channels of distributions of our Lua IDE, Lua Development Tools:
Our ready-to-use RCP distro which is served by download.eclipse.org and its mirrors,
We are part of the Juno aggregator and serve an Eclipse feature for LDT
And, last but not least, we use the awesome Eclipse MarketPlace to reach even more users and simplify the installation process
Making sure you track your eclipse.org downloads
Prior to even trying to consolidate your download statistics, you have to make sure that the files you deliver are correctly tracked by the eclipse.org infrastructure.
For our RCP product, it means that we have to make sure that we use mirror URLs. Not only does it mean that it is likely that the best mirror will be picked, and the download experience will be as fast as possible for the end user, but it also means that this “hit” will be tracked by eclipse.org servers. We’ll see in just a few moments how you can actually access the data collected by this script.
When it comes to your update sites, whether your are aggregated in the Simultaneous Release train our have separate repositories, you should have correctly configured your p2 repositories so as, again, download.eclipse.org is correctly “pinged” every time such or such IU is installed by someone. You very likely don’t want to track all your IUs (except maybe if you have platform-specific fragments and want to track then), and will usually only track your main feature(s).
Accessing the download stats
The statistics of the files downloaded via the mirror script and p2 downloads stats mechanism mentioned earlier are accessible to all Eclipse committers via the My Foundation Portal.
If you are distributing stuff via the Eclipse MarketPlace, you probably already know that the Metrics tab of your project gives you access to the download stats.
Consolidating
Now that you have download stats being collected by your downloads, and installations from your update sites or via the Marketplace, I am sure you’d like to monitor them easily, right?
So hopefuly you’ll be interested in the following Ruby script:
As you can see, I need to improve the code/comment ratio 🙂 but I am sure you can tweak it to suit your needs.
The main thing that may not be obvious at first sight is that the script expects on the standard input a raw HTML corresponding to the download stats, as served by My Foundation Portal, you are interested in parsing and consolidating. Please make sure you are in the “Daily download stats per file” view mode before running your query. For Koneki, I run the query against the partial file name “koneki” to get all the informations regarding downloads of file whose name contain “koneki”.
The script will then use regular expressions black magic to arrange your download stats, p2 repo stats, as well as MarketPlace stats (for which you can see the values are stored in the script itself, lines 109-129) into “downloadtype-date-# of downloads” triplet.
You’ll also see that, probably because of some nasty bots, some download stats are erroneous and have to be fixed manually (lines 41-79).
If all goes well, the script will output consolidated stats on stdout, … something like this:
It should now be trivial for you to feed this into Excel, or BIRT, and create a crosstab that you can use as is, or for getting nice charts
Forum activity
Another great metric for evaluating the success of your community is the activity on your forum.
Since the FUDForum instance hosted at eclipse.org exposes RSS feeds for each forum, it is pretty trivial to use these feeds for knowing who posts on your forum, and when.
Again, a small Ruby script is gonna be of great help for consolidating the number of posts per day, as well as knowing who your top contributors are.
This script is way simpler than the previous one, and you should have nothing to adapt besides using your own frm_id instead of Koneki’s. As for the downloads, you can feed the output of this script into your favorite spreadsheet, and visualize the activity on your forum.
eclipse.org resources are precious so please try to avoid running this script for digging into the whole history of your forum, especially if it is pretty large.
I hope you found this all useful, feel free to comment, fork, adapt, and improve these scripts, and share about the metrics you are monitoring!
