Recently I have seen a couple of improvements making Eclipse a more welcome place, especially for newcomers, but also for everyone else. Here is my personal New and Noteworthy of the category Easy Access:
Get Involved!
It’s amazing that Eclipse has existed for so long without a Get involved web site which lists different possibilities of how to contribute. I’m very happy with it, especially since I’m one of the authors and my proposal for the header image was chosen (maybe because nobody spotted my bank’s proposal):
Add comments to bug 280730: something missing?, wording, design, etc.
Marketplace
At the end of last year the new Marketplace replaced the Eclipse Plug-in Central. Marketplace looks nice and I also like the new transparent voting system. Maybe we could find a better logo for it. And what about the feature “People who viewed this plug-in also have viewed these plug-ins: …”?
Xtext – New web site design
Xtext was the first project to use the new Nova template. Both newcomers and developers are addressed by for example a one minute intro movie and also a commits statistics. I’m looking forward for more projects adapting Nova.
Continuous integration with Hudson
A continuous integration server for example runs all JUnit or computes some metrics. I’m happy that my favorite one, Hudson, works for me at Eclipse. If you do not know it or want to know more about Hudson and you understand German and live near Stuttgart you should attend Dr. Simon Wiest’s talk show about Hudson next Thursday (see slides from last year but you have to see him live).
Mylyn Connector discovery
Since Mylyn 3.2 it has been possible to install a new connector within the New Repository Query dialog. This feature will become a generic P2 function (see bug 295273). That’s really cool!
Eclipse Labs
Eclipse Labs has been announced to become a kind of Forge where Eclipse-based projects will be hosted without the need to be a real Eclipse project (so why not call it Eclipse Forge instead of Eclipse Labs?). Sad to hear Oracle is going to stop Kenai. Sun with Netbeans is a great competitor and hopefully will not be weakened by business decisions.
Distributed revision control
Since two weeks EGit builds have been available and the first writeable GIT repositories have been set up. I have tested Mercurial which is just another distributed revision control system with HgEclipse. If you believe the network must slow down all your version control actions then you will have to change your mind like me. Great that there are already open source Eclipse plug-ins available for both GIT and Mercurial.
The next big improvement of the category Easy Access may hopefully be bug 243582: Importing bundles into the workspace gets a 4th option, “Import with Source from Repository”.
The future is bright. The obstacles are lowered. Come in and explore the Eclipse universe:

