South Africa Eclipse Expert Group

Eclipse technologies are not that widely used in South Africa (except for the Eclipse IDE). As a result, there are not many (if any) companies concentrating on building skills in that area. However, an increasing number of local companies are using especially Eclipse RCP to build rich applications with, or introducing OSGi in their architecture (and to code Eclipse properly, one needs to know OSGi).

The Vision

My company recently had the vision to create THE leading Eclipse technologies expert group in Southern Africa. We have been spending more and more time supporting other companies in their use of Eclipse technologies, as well as increasing our portfolio of Eclipse-based projects.

And we're running out of skilled people.

We now started to grow a team of Java developers to become a team of experts on Eclipse technologies, including RCP, RAP, GEF, EclipseLink and OSGi.

The Mission

Our mission for the Eclipse Expert Group can be stated as:

• become experts in Eclipse technologies
• deliver quality software using Eclipse technologies
• provide expert advise and support to other companies that need it
• increase the local Eclipse skills by providing training and mentoring
• contribute to the Eclipse community by participating in open-source projects

For me this is a very exciting vision.

To the wider Eclipse community out there (of whom very few are based in South Africa) : I want to invite you to provide me with tips, input and advise on growing this team; maybe even come and visit us as part of your next Africa safari, or supply opportunities to do work for you. One never knows, maybe in a few years we'll have some international Eclipse conferences down here :-)

PS: We started on the open-source road by making the commercial version of RCP Toolbox open-source.