Despite having spun out the Eclipse consortium into an independent Eclipse Foundation, IBM continues to invest in the organization and its technology, particularly in attracting developers to the platform.
Last month, IBM announced the winners of the first International Challenge for Eclipse, as well as the recipients of Eclipse Innovation Grants, and IBMs sponsorship of the Association for Computing Machinerys International Collegiate Programming Contest, held at the end of March in Prague. It also shared information on grants the company provides to colleges for innovative uses of Eclipse.
Gabriel Silberman, program director for IBM Centers for Advanced Studies at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, in Hawthorne, N.Y., said the EIG program is in its second year. In its first year, IBM awarded about 50 grants to university faculty and researchers. “This year we managed to award about 75 grants” amounting to nearly $3 million in awards over the two-year period, he said.
This years grant winners include Universidade da Coruña, in Spain, for a project for enabling visually impaired software developers; Universität des Saarlandes, in Germany, for a project related to changes in programming and applying data mining to version histories of large software systems; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass., for work on continuous testing, Java dialects and education; and the University of Cambridge, in England, for a project related to modular image processing for magnetic resonance brain imaging.
The ICE competition winner was the team of Gabriela Perez and Pablo Pesce, from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for an Eclipse plug-in called Pampero, which is an educational tool supporting model-driven software development using graphical notation, Silberman said.
Other winning entries hailed from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de lElectronique et de Ses Applications, in Cergy, France; North Carolina State University, in Raleigh; the University of Hannover, in Hannover, Germany; and the Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, Silberman said.
Eclipse was the development platform at the IBM-sponsored ACM competition held March 31 in Prague, Czech Republic. The St. Petersburg Institute of Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics, in St. Petersburg, Russia, won the competition. Silberman said prior to the annual World finals for this contest, the ACM puts on a Java Challenge, which is based on Eclipse.
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