The Eclipse Foundation has announced the winners of the annual Eclipse Community Awards on the opening day EclipseCon 2012. The awards recognize the top individuals, projects and technologies in the Eclipse ecosystem.
The winners in the individual and project categories were selected via an online vote. Individuals winning awards include Sven Efftinge, lead and architect of Eclipse Xtext and the language Xtend, Stephan Herrmann, Eclipse Object Teams project lead, and, we're delighted to report, InfoQ's own Alex Blewitt.
The Eclipse Communication Framework won the Most Open Project award, with Eclipse Code Recommenders winning in the innovation category.
Technology awards are selected by a judging panel, and the winners were recording JVM debugger Chronon, modelling/reverse engineering tool MaintainJ, and the Justinmind Prototyper.
Amongst other things, the EclipseCon sessions today have covered the Eclipse 4 Application Platform, which is going to be the basis of this year's Eclipse Juno release. Eclipse 4 represents a significant re-write of the Eclipse UI infrastructure to use a model based UI, instead of code to represent the user interfaces. The model can be queried, manipulated, and extended, allowing for rapid design and customisation of the user interface. It also supports the use of web styling technology (CSS), allowing the presentation of user interface elements to be infinitely tweaked and reconfigured without any modification of application code. In addition, the revamped platform adds a new services-oriented programming model that makes it easier to use the discreet application services of the Eclipse platform.
Soon after Juno we expect to see version 1.0 of Orion, the Eclipse foundation's browser-based IDE for building Web applications, which was announced at last year's EclipseCon event, and there are a couple of sessions on the product at the conference. Orion is intended for HTML and JavaScript development, with Mozilla already using the Orion editor in its Firefox developer tools.
Other topics at EclipseCon 2012 include OSGi, developing Android applications via Eclipse tools, Application Lifecycle Management, and sessions showcasing Eclipse tooling for JavaFX, and JavaFX interop with SWT and Swing.
Eclipse reached its 10th birthday last November. You can read more about the history of the project here.