TL;DR

Projects hosted by the Eclipse Foundation will soon benefit from a brand new enterprise-grade continuous integration (CI) infrastructure. Expected improvements are: resiliency, scalability and nimbleness. We are doing this move with tremendous support from our friends at CloudBees and RedHat with their respective products Jenkins Enterprise and OpenShift Container Platform.

Key takeaways:

Do you want to see a Chromium based SWT Browser implementation? Please donate (or reach out to me if you want to do corporate donations) and the Eclipse Foundation will make it happens via the Friends of Eclipse Enhancement Program (FEEP).

Browser support in SWT has always been a complicated story. By default (meaning without any hint from the application developers and the users), SWT relies on “native” renderers (Internet Explorer on Windows, WebKit on macOS and WebKitGTK+ or Mozilla/XULRunner on Linux). While supporting different rendering of pages in the Web is common, it’s annoying when you develop a desktop application where the Browser component is used to render things that Web technologies can do better than SWT (CSS, SVG, WebGL, etc.). Not only that, but you would expect high performance from the renderer for such usage.

For the very first time, a Devoxx conference is happening in the USA, in San Jose, CA. It starts on March 21, 2017 and is 3 days long. Devoxx conferences are famous in Europe (organized in Belgium, France, UK, Poland, and Morocco) for their high quality talks from amazing speakers. They are also very high rated because it is organized by developers for developers. Talks are all highly technical and the required experience from the targeted audience ranges from beginners to experts. So, with more than 200 sessions (chosen from 750 submissions!), everyone is able to craft its very own personal conference schedule. Do not trust me, check the program by yourself!

The Eclipse Foundation is actively seeking bids on 10 new FEEP Development Efforts, along with 5 outstanding Development Efforts that have not yet been bid. The objective is to have this work completed in the 1st quarter of 2017.

The call for papers for EclipseConverge 2017 is open. It is the first step toward what ought to be another great Eclipse event. For those who may not know, Eclipse Converge is a new event for the Eclipse community. It is a one-day summit dedicated exclusively to Eclipse technologies, with the goal of allowing our North American developer community to meet and share ideas.

You remember the Friends of Eclipse Enhancement Program, right? It is a program that utilizes all the donations made through the Friends of Eclipse program to make significant and meaningful improvements and enhancements to the Eclipse IDE/Platform. I think it is a good time for me to provide you with an update about what we have done in the last quarter with this program.

FEEP does sound like a bird call, but it stands for Friend of Eclipse Enhancement Program. Yes, it is a mouthful. You may wonder what it stand for… Well, let me tell you!

Two weeks ago I was in Paris for Devoxx France 2016 where I’ve presented what’s new in the upcoming Eclipse release (aka Neon — to be released in June). During the talk, I’ve been asked if Eclipse will eventually cancel a background task (a job in the Eclipse terminology) when it is asked for. Who never fulminate against a progress bar stating that cancel has been requested and that the task does not finish quickly?