I’ve been having some fun today with Google Insights for Search, and of course my first thought was to examine trends relating to the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. And what did I find? Here is a chart showing historical data beginning in 2004 for the search “eclipse rcp”.
First, this is just awesome data! You can drill down to individual countries, states/provinces or even cities. I could play with this all day, but I really should get back to work!
Unfortunately the news isn’t good for Eclipse RCP. It’s interesting that while Eclipse RCP job postings are trending up, the search statistics are telling a different story. The stats for RCP look even worse when you compare them to Adobe Flex, which many (mistakenly, I believe) think of as a substitute for RCP.
We obviously need to do a much better job promoting Eclipse RCP. There are so many things involved with this, including making the platform easier to use (hopefully the e4 project will help) and also communicating clearly what Eclipse RCP is and why it’s useful. I’ll have something to say about this later point in upcoming posts, but I’d be curious to hear what others have to say. What do you think can be done to better promote Eclipse RCP?