Google joins forces with the Eclipse Foundation to launch Eclipse Labs, a portal hosting open-source projects based on Eclipse.
Google and the Eclipse Foundation have launched a beta of Eclipse
Labs, a portal for hosting open-source projects based on Eclipse.
In a May 13 blog post, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse
Foundation, said Eclipse Labs gives developers who want to create Eclipse-based
projects a "third option." The other two options are to use the
formal Eclipse process and "propose a project with the Eclipse Foundation,"
or to "start a project on one of the existing forges, [such as] Google
Code, SourceForge [or] Codehaus."
Milinkovich continued, "Eclipse Labs allows you to very quickly create
an open-source project with access to an issue tracking system, source code
repository (Subversion or Mercurial) and a project Website. The default license
is EPL [Eclipse Public License] but you can
change it to the other licenses available on Google Code. Anyone can create a
project on Eclipse Labs at any time."
Ian Skerrett, director of marketing for Eclipse, said there are lots of
Eclipse-based open-source projects that people start but don't need or want to
be official Eclipse Foundation projects. Eclipse Labs is now a destination for
those projects. Google is hosting Eclipse Labs as a service on the Google Code
Project Hosting.
Milinkovich also said, "Eclipse Labs project owners will be encouraged
to create tags [or] labels to describe [their projects]. We have prepopulated a
set of Eclipse-specific labels that will be displayed on the Eclipse Labs
search page. Eclipse Labs will also have an API
that allows people to search on these labels. ... We also want to populate
Eclipse Marketplace with the projects from Eclipse Labs. The API
is not yet available but it should be in the next couple of weeks."
However, "Projects hosted on Eclipse Labs are not official Eclipse
projects," Milinkovich noted. "Therefore, they can't be called
Eclipse projects, use the org.eclipse namespace or be included in the Release
Train or Packages."
In a post on the Google
Code blog, Ali Pasha, a product manager for Google Project Hosting, said,
"The goal of Eclipse Labs is to improve the visibility of unofficial
add-on projects. We hope that this will help Eclipse users find those projects
quickly and that it will help popular projects get on the path to becoming
Eclipse Foundation projects."
Pasha said there are two projects that have migrated to Eclipse Labs:
Workspace Mechanic for Eclipse and Project Hosting Connector for Mylyn, an
Eclipse plug-in for the Google Project Hosting issue tracker.
Google Software Engineer Robert
Konigsberg explained, "The Workspace Mechanic is a publicly released
version of a tool we use at Google to automate maintenance of our engineers'
Eclipse environments."
For more information on Eclipse Labs, check out the FAQ.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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