[Mike Smithson]

I want to say that I am a big fan of MyEclipse. However, I am concerned that the development of Blue is going to interfere with the aggressive release schedule of MyEclipse, eroding customer loyalty and admiration for MyEclipse. I have not seen anything related to development efforts for 6.1 recently and have been disappointed with the MyEclipse support people being so quiet about what is going on with this next release. Will someone please speak up???

[Riyad Kalla]

Sorry about the lack of comm Mike, I think about 70% of that was because of the holidays, it’s the only time of the year we get to see our families so we get pretty dark around here during that time.

Genuitec certainly has a lot on it’s plate now with MyEclipse, Blue and Pulse but that also means some awesome opportunities to grow which is what we have been doing and will continue to do. So the same dedicated teams that have kicked ass on MyEclipse for the last few years will continue to do so as new folks take the reigns for Blue and Pulse and so on.

The nice thing about Blue is that a lot of side-effect enhancements will likely trickle down into MyEclipse proper as a result since Blue is focused on the WAS/RAD market. We are looking at a March release for Blue and June/July release for what I am guessing will become MyEclipse 6.5, but that will have some of the non-RAD specific stuff in it from Blue that will be very nice (JAX-WS for example).

At the beginning of every new year we get pretty quiet and just strategize/plan/meet/etc. So that’s what we are doing now. Then we will start announcing deliverables as usual very shortly then you’ll have too many cool new products than you know what to do with 😉

[bsavardnok]

Hi.

I’ve been a paying subscriber for a while now. And I’m concerned that my subscription dollars are not going toward funding upgrading the product I’m paying for, but are being used to fund Blue, which I have no use for. This also happened a while back when updates to ME slowed down while you focused on delivering for one particular large customer, Hitachi.

So what do the rest of us get for our subscription dollars during the times when most of your effort goes into producing client-specific customizations that most of us probably won’t ever use?

If 6.5 will only be out in June/July, how about I only pay for 50% of this year’s subscription price? And what happened to 6.1 through 6.4?

I just renewed my pro subscription again, and $63 (with tax) a year is very inexpensive for a subscription, but it’s the principle of the matter I’m getting at.

Thanks for allowing me to rant a little 🙂

[Riyad Kalla]

bsavard,
You are always welcome to constructively rant, we listen to all compliments and complaints to get a sense of what our users are feeling.

We absolutely appreciate your business and if at any point you feel the product is not performing how you need it to perform and not helping you be $63 more productive each year you use it, we always offer our any-time refund. Of course I’m not asking you to leave, I just want to lay the cards on the table and make sure any customer feeling unhappy knows about our “no tricks” refund policy. We want you guys happy ultimately, that’s why we pull these ungodly work hours to get this stuff released and tuned to make sure you are more productive for it.

As for Blue development, I think an incorrect assumption was made that these products all exist in a vacuum separated from each other, which just isn’t the case. A high-profile example of that is the JAX-WS work going into Blue is going to be brought into MyEclipse proper for 6.5, there are more underlying changes like the connectors platform being tuned up and made more robust along with the deployer that are all going to be pulled into MyEclipse 6.5. As for the Hitachi work, there were literally hundreds of enhancements and bug fixes that were rolled into the product as a result of that. It might have seemed it was external because it was work happening outside of the normal Genuitec -> Customer channel, but when you actually dig into the issue tracker to look at all the little bugs that were fixed because of it, it’s pretty eye opening.

So don’t get too down, there is a lot of stuff going on, but at the end of the day shipping an IDE is what we are here to do. I’m sorry if we were making our long time supporters feel “left out”… I’ll try and push for a “freaking 6.5 roadmap” here from management soon to help make it easier to see what is coming, but they are understandably tied up with getting Blue released at the moment and then right after that the elephant in the room is prep-work to do for EclipseCon, that’s always a big job each year.

The good news is that right after EC we don’t just have 6.5 lined up, but 7.0 which will be based on the Ganymede (sp?) platform release, so releases should be plentiful this year.

The other thing to remember is that as the product gets larger and larger, our internal QA cycles and milestone cycles get longer and longer. If you have been with us since the pre 3.8.0 days, you remember how releases popped out every couple of months? Those QA cycles were only a few days, because we had deployer, connectors and a few editors to check… now we have about 800% more code to check, enhance, and fix with each release so it’s just a naturally longer dev cycle. One of the changes we are trying to make (that you can see some what now) is pulling apart major features like M4M, and Reports into individual projects that can be released and maintained independently of the main MyEclipse product, this allows for faster updates for those portions and more focused mangement.

Going forward we are going to try and do that more, especially with Pulse making management of that stuff dead-easy. (NOTE: As an example we pushed out a Matisse4MyEclipse complete end-to-end refresh and a MyEclipse Reports new product recently all outside of an official MyEclipse release instead of holding those back for the main MyEclipse release).

I hope that gives you some insight into the process and a bit more information to feel better about. And again, please don’t forget that we appreciate every customer we have. You have a lot of choices in the tools space, and we want to keep you.

As for 6.1->6.4… version numbers is marketing’s job 😀

[bsavardnok]

Riyad,

Thanks for your reply. As always, you’re willing to give us what I feel are honest answers, and I really appreciate that. In my mind, that’s one of the things that sets you guys apart from the rest.
Like I said in my post, I don’t think $63 is a lot of money for the value ME provides. From a pure business perspective, I understand how ME is willing to chase potentially large individual customers or segments at the expense of all us smaller shops, even if we get some trickle-down benefits from the customer-specific efforts. But I hope that ME management remembers us smaller shops who’ve been with you from the beginning.

Thanks.

[Riyad Kalla]

Out of curiosity bsavard, what are the 3 biggest features you use now, and 3 most-wanted features you guys want to see in one of the future ME releases?

[bsavardnok]

Hi.

What I’d like to see in ME (in order of preference):

1) Better CSS editor. I currently use TopStyle Pro. It’s awesome, but it’s not updated often and I’d rather have it built into Eclipse so I can run it on any OS. In Eclipse/ME/WTP, all you can do is get type-ahead which is nice, but pretty lame for such a powerful IDE. I’d much rather have better CSS support than the image editor. If I want to edit images, I’ll use a specialty program like Photoshop.

2) I’ve been asking for XSLT capabilities for a while: the simple ability to choose an engine, point to an XML file, and have the transform run. Being able to step/debug would be awesome. Oxygen does a great job at this but it’s expensive for an XML/XSLT IDE.

3) Struts2 support.

4) Being able to remove capabilities (Struts, Hibernate, etc) from a project they’ve been added to.

What I use ME for the most:

1) JSP/servlet development
2) Struts/Hibernate
3) plain old Java and HTML

Thanks,
-Bob

[Riyad Kalla]

Bob,
Thanks for the list, it jives with some personal items I’ve been pushing as well.

[bhoylma]

Hello —

So maybe it’s time to break this beast into more manageable pieces. I mean 311MB for a “plugin” has probably outgrown it’s maintainability/manageability boundaries. Breaking it into more plugin-like pieces would certainly relieve the pressure on your release cycle. I’m not sure I completely understand where MyEclipse is heading ultimately. Is it at some point going to be completely stand-alone, in terms of not only providing the ME functionality but also to include a fully integrated JDT? It’s almost as if we’ll soon be looking for the Eclipse JDT plugin to fit into ME 🙂 Anyways, that’s just my engineering speaking. I also don’t use all the features that ME provides so it would be nice to be able to NOT install certain parts of it as needed.

Thanks for the product and the hard work surrounding it.

Peace.

[Author]

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