Eclipse Galileo is out now. It is remarkable: 33 projects and 24 million lines of code, according to the press release. Perhaps the two biggest features in this release are support for Mac Cocoa - in order words, proper Mac support - and PHP development tools. All open source, all free.

Unsurprisingly, Eclipse appears to be the most popular Java development tool, and if you extend that to IDEs based on Eclipse, its dominance is overwhelming. Its obvious rival, Netbeans, has improved greatly in the last few years and may be better for some purposes; but it looks unlikely to catch Eclipse, and the impact of Oracle's impending acquisition of Sun is unknown.

Eclipse has also influenced other development tools, forcing vendors to offer more for free and to improve their extensibility. You can see this effect in Visual Studio, for example, with its Express editions and both technical and licensing enhancements to its extensibility in recent times. Microsoft may say that this would have happened anyway, but I am doubtful. Eclipse changed the game.

Still, there is something that I've always found intriguing about Eclipse, which may be a weakness in its business model (if a free platform can have such a thing). I put this to Executive Director Mike Milinkovich and he responded robustly, which I like because it usually means I've asked a good question.

Eclipse is a a tools platform, not an IDE, and member companies build their own products based on the shared platform. Examples are Adobe with Flex Builder, IBM with Rational Application Developer, Zend with Zend Studio, and Embarcadero with JBuilder. Each of these companies has a dilemma. The more they invest in the shared platform, the more they collectively benefit by getting features that they do not have to build on their own; but the better the shared platform gets, the more difficult it is to differentiate and sell their commercial products. I asked Milinkovich about this tension and he interrupted me:

That's not a tension, that's exactly the way Eclipse is designed to work. That is the Eclipse business model. Our licensing model and our business model are geared around the notion that we're building an open source platform which then people build products on top and differentiate in the marketplace based on what they do on the proprietary side.

Although Milinkovich says it is "not a tension", Embarcadero CEO Wayne Williams complained about this very thing, telling me that IBM is now pulling back from investment in Eclipse and reserving the best new features for its own products - which, whatever the truth of the matter, IBM has every right to do.

An additional factor is the difference between vendors like Google, which has an Eclipse plug-in for App Engine, but is only concerned to promote its platform; and those like Embarcadero whose business is selling tools. Vendors like Google can improve Eclipse without any threat to their business.

Eclipse is wildly popular, but came last in a recent Software Development Platform survey of developer satisfaction by Evans Data. To be fair, all the products won a reasonably good rating, so we should not infer that Eclipse is poor; it is not. I can understand, though, why some member companies may be happy to see Eclipse rated as good, but not too good, giving them space for their Eclipse-based products; and if this is the case, it may limit the extent to which Eclipse is likely to improve.

Hope for green shoots of economic recovery, especially within the IT sector,  are likely to be further bolstered by the Government's Digital Britain Report, which has pledged to invest 23m to encourage smaller businesses invest   in IT in order to help improve their business.

As the potential demand for IT workers, both permanent and contract, looks set to reflect a small rise in demand, candidates may find themselves in a slightly stronger position when it comes to negotiating terms than they have been in the recent past.  If so, it's important to keep a few points in mind:

Firstly, research. If negotiating money, candidates need to be aware of the current jobs market - what's available and how reasonable their current rate is. This may have changed in recent weeks and months so be sure to keep a constant eye on the market.

Secondly it's important to be sensitive to your employer's current state. If the organisation has or is looking to make redundancies, or has posted poor financial figures recently, it may be unreasonable to even approach a discussion about higher pay rates. 

Also, candidates should look at their skills set and their experience and gauge this against the current jobs market and their colleagues in similar positions. Be clear about your skills and qualifications and your experience within an industry; it's important to be absolutely sure how these benchmark you amongst others in your specialisation.

Finally, it's important to maintain a sense of perspective. The Government investment will certainly be the first helpful step on the road to recovery, but it is, after all, just that - a first step. Employers are still likely to be cautious when it comes to making new hires and deciding what financial commitments they are willing to take on, so be willing to compromise where necessary.

I've just completed several weeks of conferences and in-house training, and I'm finally back home for a while. It's amazing to me how many sources of inexpensive learning there are.

1. Conferences. Conferences are amazingly cheap for learning about a wide variety of topics and techniques, especially because you have an opportunity to network with and speak with not just speakers but all the other people at the conference. If you use your time well, you can meet people in a similar position as you are, and learn from what they do. The speakers generally take excerpts from their workshops to use in tutorials, so you have a chance to audition the speakers. Think about it: it may cost you a max of $3000 to participate in a week-long conference, assuming you did not take advantage of early-bird discounts for registration and travel. If you learn something at a conference that saves you a week of work over the course of a year and you tell one other person about that tip and it saves them a week, you have more than made back the cost of the conference. Many of you are probably thinking I've gone off the deep end (since when is $3000 cheap??), but think about the potential return.
   
2. Books. Books that are well-written and explain how to do things first, second, third, are worth way more than their cover price. And, given the electronic readers and pdf books out there, I'm astonished more people don't buy books as a matter of course, when they want to learn something. It's hard to get cheaper than a book, but some local meetings are free.
   
3. User group and other affinity group meetings. If you would like to learn about a small area in a field, check out some user group or other group meetings, such as agile, or testing, or project management. Generally, the cost to attend a meeting is about the cost of a book, maybe a little more depending on how nice the dinner is. You will not get the breadth of a conference or a depth of a book, but you will learn something. BTW, if you are looking for a job, these groups are also great for networking.
   

You can also learn from searching the web, and it's harder to know if what you are reading is correct :-) So before you think there is no money to learn new things, rethink. See what ways are good for you and fit your budget.

And for those of you with conference money, I'm a host of the AYE conference, and the conference chair for Agile 2009.  

Question: which is best for cross-platform, managed code using a runtime such as Java, .NET, or Flash, or is it native code? When Java arrived in 1996, Sun promoted write-once-run-everywhere as one of its key benefits. The arrival of just-in-time compilers for all the runtimes mentioned above removes many performance concerns. So is managed code the best solution?

My assumptions about this were challenged when I spoke to Embarcadero's CEO Wayne Williams last week. His company is the one that now owns Delphi and C++ Builder, the RAD software development tools, after acquiring Borland's Codegear division last year. Williams told me that taking Delphi and C++ Builder cross-platform is now the top priority for the team working on those products. Concerning native code, he said: "It's crystal clear. If you want a small, fast, GUI-rich application, and you want to target the popular platforms, there's only one game in town." That means at least x86 code for Windows, Mac and Linux, and he added, "there's no reason mobile devices shouldn't be on that roadmap as well."

What's wrong with Java then? "There's always been two approaches to target multiple platforms. One is interpreted, where you shield the code the developer is writing from those differences. The Virtual Machine is responsible for that, and if you want to add another platform, it's all centralised. It's easier, but the result is poor, it's a least common denominator approach.

"It's a bigger investment and it's more difficult to cross-compile, where you natively target these platforms, but the end result is much better. You're running true native code with full access to whatever hardware there is on that platform."

It was like going back in time: I recall similar arguments about Java back in the nineties. Since then, we've had not only JIT compilers but also huge increases in hardware performance. Is Williams living in the past?

Before dismissing what he says, it's worth noting that native code has never gone away. I use cross-platform native code applications all the time, from the SQLite database engine to the Audacity sound editor, and I enjoy their small size and fast performance. Over at Google, the Chrome team is hard at work delivering a new web browser, and it is mostly written in C++. Most of Windows is written in C++, despite Microsoft's commitment to .NET; and Java is an afterthought in Apple's OS X.

Although hardware performance has improved, the increasing numbers of mobile devices with constrained resources is a counter-balance to the idea that hardware takes care of inefficient code; and although managed code is fine for many business applications, it's hard to quibble with Williams' contention above that "If you want a small, fast, GUI-rich application, and you want to target the popular platforms, there's only one game in town."

There is another argument for managed code, which is that applications are quicker to write and safer to run when they are under the control of a runtime virtual machine. That is generally true as well. Still, Delphi does a great job of hiding the complexity of native code development. It may be just a little anachronistic, but if Embarcadero successfully deliver a cross-platform Delphi compiler, I think there will be plenty of take-up.

Williams says we may see cross-platform Delphi as soon as next year.

There is currently a real need for businesses executives at the top end of large and complex organisations to understand exactly what's happening on the lower levels and one of the best ways they can access this information is through Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

In recent times BI systems have become increasingly sophisticated, which combined with the economic downturn, has lead to a huge increase in the number of businesses and organisations choosing to implement these systems to increase profit margins wherever possible.

BI offers the ability to analyse in great detail exactly what's happening in a business and where cost can be cut. For example, many organisations rely on multiple databases containing a variety of business-critical data - orders, sales information, contacts, supplier, invoicing information and much more. Skilled Business Intelligence workers are able to develop applications in which data can pooled into a data warehouse, from which organisations can run a variety of reports, build data relationships and pull out relevant information that they need.

Keeping on top of corporate data is integral to running a successful organisation and we're finding that many big companies are investing time, funds and resources in BI technology, BI consultancy and developing in-house skills to best analyse the data they have at their disposal. Even smaller establishments and companies are seeing the value of recruiting individuals with specialist skills in this area. Some organisations choose to enlist BI expertise to set up a system and train existing employees to create an internal team responsible for BI.

As a result, it's unlikely that the need for BI will reduce in the short-term as companies are always likely to analyse their operations. As such, all information skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better perception of their current position will continue to be desirable.

BI is an area of expertise that could help to build a long-lasting and rewarding career in IT and for candidates who think it might be the right fit for them, there are certainly many opportunities out there to be taken.

I was speaking with a colleague of long-standing (an old friend). He's newly unemployed. He's been a tester for years, and for the last few years has been a developer. He'd like to keep doing development kinds of work, possibly creating automated tests or for a product. But he's resigned himself to being a tester.

I asked him what he wanted to do. "Oh, development. But no one will hire me for that." I asked why. "Because I was a tester for so long".

Your attitude around a potential job will shine through in an interview. If you would not hire yourself for a particular job, no one else will. Part of your job search is to manage your reactions to a potential job as you search. Some ideas about what you can do:

1. Know what you want to do. If you see a job you could do, but it's not what you want, reassess whether you want to investigate this job. If they hired you, would you work there? Sometimes the answer is "yes, because I'm broke." But more often, the answer is "Hmm, that's not really the right job for me."
2. If you're relatively new to a particular role, and you have a ton of experience in another role, make a list of all the reasons why your more junior role is the role for you. Go back to your resume and take a look at your accomplishments.
3. Use those accomplishments to explain your value to other people. Take the time to articulate your story of why you are valuable in your preferred job. My colleague has a bunch of stories to support how his testing expertise makes him an amazing developer, especially in a test-driven environment.

Your attitude about a potential job has a huge effect on an interviewer. What does your attitude say?

You might not be aware of the pattern, "Broken Windows." Well, I think it's a pattern. It's at least a parable. The idea is that if you allow a broken window, pretty soon the neighborhood deteriorates, because other people think it's ok to leave broken windows, litter, graffiti, and more. Soon enough, you have a neighborhood no one wants to live in.

We see the Broken Window pattern at work all the time: builds that stay broken or take too long, defects that remain open, coffee machines where the coffee has boiled away, recycling containers where no one has taken out the recycling.

Broken Windows matter even more on a resume. If you can't somehow help the hiring manager see that you don't tolerate small problems on your resume, the hiring manager thinks you can tolerate them at work.

Make sure someone else reviews your resume. Look for Broken Windows in all of your work. Talk about it in an interview--you'll make points :-)

Don't leave a mess for other people to clean up. They won't.

The Web is broken in lots of ways, one of which is that its content is mostly unstructured. Most web pages have a title and some content, and that is about all you can assume. Researchers and standards bodies have been trying to impose more semantic order on the web since its earliest days, by adding metadata so that web crawlers can parse the content accurately, rather than relying on inference. These efforts have had little success outside academia; and the semantic content of typical pages has arguably got worse rather than better, thanks to the trend towards richer pages using JavaScript and Flash, rather than simple text marked up with HTML.

Microformats are a softer approach to adding metadata, using standard HTML but with conventions that identify certain types of content, such as name and address details (hCard), events (hCalendar), or even CVs (hResume). If you have web pages that include content of this type, you can usually mark it up according to the microformat specification without damaging the appearance of the page. The benefit is greater searchability; in fact, you could think of it as a kind of search engine optimization.

A good example is hReview, a draft specification for reviews of anything from products to events or places. If I'm considering a purchase, I often type in a search for "product x review", and then find myself sifting through lots of useless results, because all the ecommerce and affiliate sites know we do that kind of search, and pretend to have reviews when really they do not. If all the sites used hReview I could do more precise searches, perhaps specifying "only reviews in the last 12 months", and sorting by rating, and the search engine could structure the results nicely so I can see at a glance the author's name and an extract from the review itself.

Simple standards like this can have a huge impact. The whole blogging revolution was driven by RSS, which itself is a kind of microformat for news.

The snag is, they have to be widely adopted to be useful. I first wrote about microformats in 2006, but despite my enthusiasm they have had little impact to date. That may be about to change. On Tuesday May 12th the mighty Google announced a new feature called Rich Snippets, which means it will be exposing microformat metadata in its search results, along with another more generic type of metadata called RDFa.

It all sounded familiar to me, as the previous weekend I attended Yahoo Hack Day in London, and heard about its Search Monkey project which also uses microformats and RDFa. Yahoo was there first; but it is Google that has the power to shake up the web.

Should you care about microformats? If Google is serious, then it will have a wide impact. Business names and locations should be marked up with hCard, for example. Anyone designing an Ecommerce site with user reviews should be looking at hReview. Although the list of microformats Google is taking note of is small at the moment, if it catches on that list will inevitably grow.

The message that Google is giving an advantage to sites that use microformats and RDFa will be heard loud and clear by the SEO community, and given the commercial importance of effective search ranking this could grow quickly.

Then again, I may be over-optimistic now (and yes, I do think it is a good idea) as I was in 2006. Watch this space.

I was speaking and teaching last week at the PMI Regina's PDC (Professional Development Conference). I taught an estimation workshop and we had some illuminating discussions about what to do when people on your project can't estimate. We all agreed people tend to be either optimistic estimators, where they think the work will take less time, or they will be pessimistic, where they think the work will take longer. Rarely does someone change. Our discussion about what to do when someone consistently miss-estimates was the part where I saw servant leadership.

One project manager said, "I don't want to crush someone's hopes or ignore their hard work, but how do I explain that each and every assignment he's been late on and I just don't believe his estimate?" Good question.

People need feedback on their estimation, and a project manager might be able to help the person see where this estimation suffers from the same problem as the previous estimations.

That's where the servant leadership comes in. A PM who's not a servant leader will think, "Hmm, your last 5 estimates have been off by 50%. I'll add 50 %," and be done with it. But a PM who is a servant leader gives feedback and asks for a re-evaluation, "Joe, you might not know this, but your most recent 5 estimates have been under-estimated by 50%. I don't want to blindly pad your estimate. I'd like to help you learn to estimate better. Is that ok?"

If that's ok with Joe, now you have a way to help the other person learn to estimate better. I like breaking tasks into inch-pebbles (one- to two-day tasks that are either done or not done), starting with user stories, or using Delphi estimation as a way to help people learn to estimate smaller tasks and see when that work is actually complete. One guy I worked with said, "I always thought it just took a few minutes to set up a new branch. But when I tracked what I did, I realised it took me closer to an hour, by the time I was actually done and ready to start writing code and tests. Who knew?" Until he created inch-pebbles he had no idea how complex his work actually was.

Great project managers serve the project and the people on the project. They don't take estimates at face value, without understanding how the estimate came to be. But they don't autocratically change the estimate without providing feedback.

If you're a leader in the organisation, whether you're a team lead, a project manager, or a manager, think about how you can serve the project, the organisation, and the people. You'll get better results if you remember the people.

Recently I have been working with Microsoft Silverlight, looking at how to put together a simple database application. I am no designer; my interest in Silverlight is to do with cross-platform deployment, a consistent runtime, and an alternative to HTML and Javascript. It seems I am not alone in this respect; the Silverlight forums are dominated by programming rather than design queries. Here are the message counts at the time of writing:

• Programming with .NET: 61,022
• Designing with Silverlight: 4,912

The Silverlight 3 wish list is also illuminating. You soon get a feel for what developers are most frustrated about, such as: no printing support, no easy way to save documents to the user's hard drive, ugly fonts, no clipboard support, no access to devices like web cams and microphones, and no support for WSHttpBinding which adds transactions and reliable messaging to web services.

Only a few of these things are fixed in the Silverlight 3.0 beta. There is a file save dialog, and text rendering is improved though Microsoft is a long way behind Adobe Flash in this respect.

That said, Silverlight 3 does offer substantial improvements for business applications. For example, in Silverlight 2.0 you have to handle client-side validation manually, whereas Silverlight 3.0 adds validation support similar to what is in ASP.NET. There is also a new server-side piece called .NET RIA Services, which wraps key areas like authentication and transactions. Although Silverlight cannot do real transactions, .NET RIA Services introduces changesets, which let you bundle a set of database updates into a single web service call. You can also include arbitrary custom operations, such as approving a purchase order. On the server side, where you do have transaction support, this is processed and can succeed or fail as an entire unit.

Despite the snags, there is a lot to like in Silverlight. As a GUI framework it works really well, and it is good to know that special effects and transitions are available are available if you need them. Microsoft appears to have executed well on the challenge of creating a smaller, cross-platform build of the .NET Framework, which is really Silverlight's key advantage.

Another plus is the ability to work in Visual Studio with the server and client projects side by side, integrated for debugging. You can set a breakpoint in the Silverlight client, and another in the ASP.NET web service implementation, and it just works.

Presuming that Microsoft's continues its rapid pace of Silverlight development, my guess it that it will evolve into an excellent client for .NET applications, since this is what the community is demanding. As yet though, Silverlight has made little impact on the wider world of web design, which remains dominated by Flash, and it is hard to see that changing.