2013 Candidate:
Christian Dupuis

Over the past several years I've been an active user of Eclipse technologies and used the Eclipse platform to build open source and commercial solutions like Spring IDE or the Spring Tool Suite. During my work on open source technologies, I have come to recognize the unique value that the Eclipse Foundation brings to the intersection of open source and corporate software development. In conjunction with a large, active and vocal community, the Eclipse Foundation had helped to define the primacy of the developer as an agent of change in the world of enterprise software.

Within recent times we've seen the rise of the Cloud, an ever increasing number of mobile devices accessing the internet and an insane amount of data being captured each day. Without question these developments affect the ways developers are building the next generation of applications; a completely new set of application styles, frameworks and tools is emerging to support these new demands.

This poses a challenge for Eclipse and its ecosystem; there are certain areas in which the Eclipse ecosystem could put additional focus to maintain its momentum and market leading position. In case the Eclipse community elects me to the Board of Directors, I would like to help making this a reality.

My vision for Eclipse in 2013:

• Web + Mobile: we are seeing the growing importance of HTML5 and JavaScript in modern web and mobile application development. There is a tremendous opportunity in this space with a wide and growing addressable market, both in terms of developers and commercial vendors that will potentially build on top of Eclipse technologies. Vert.x and its potential move to the Eclipse Foundation is a good example of what role the Eclipse Foundation could play in this space; even beyond the traditional tooling. As a board member, I will help ensure that Eclipse gets the necessary resources to extend the Eclipse stack and become a viable option for web and mobile application development.
• Cloud: many people may see Cloud as a buzzword. But while working at VMware I have come to see that the Cloud is a reality through the community interest in the open source Cloud Foundry platform. While I was working on the Eclipse integration for Cloud Foundry it became clear that there is a lot that Eclipse could offer as part of the platform to support Cloud platforms and vendors.
  • Eclipse, through the WTP project, managed to build a platform for traditional application server vendors to extend for their server runtimes. This has led to a flourishing ecosystem of providers for nearly every application server in the market. I think a similar effort is required to provide extension mechanisms for cloud providers to plug in their PaaS and IaaS offerings. This goes beyond simple deploy-start-stop scenarios and will include, for example, provisioning and configuring platform services in a Cloud environment.
  • More and more components of the development lifecycle are moving into the Cloud. I think it is only natural for cloud providers to host editing or IDE solutions in close proximity to the application code. There is a unique opportunity to work with the various cloud providers to position Orion as the editing solution of choice in those environments.

Christian Dupuis is Director, R&D for the SpringSource division of VMware with responsibilities for the Spring project offerings, including the Spring Framework. From the very early days of Spring, Christian worked with the Spring team around Rod Johnson and others in the open source space. In 2004 Christian co-founded the well known Spring IDE open source project that brings development tools for the Spring projects to the Eclipse platform.

More recently Christian was responsible for the implementation of the Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse which gives developers easy access to VMware's multi-language, multi-framework PaaS. He is also actively involved in moving the SpringSource dm Server Tools into Eclipse Virgo project.

Christian has been developing Java enterprise applications since 1997. During this time, Christian designed complex software architectures with a focus on multi-tiered, web-based, client-server applications using enterprise Java technologies and the Spring Framework. Prior to joining SpringSource, Christian worked as consultant and project manager for one of the leading global technology consulting firms in the financial sector in central Europe.

Christian served on the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors starting February 2013.