For our August “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected Eclipse Tomcat Plugin, which offers simple handling of a tomcat server in Eclipse IDE. Current project developer Markus Keunecke shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the Eclipse Tomcat Plugin project please.
Markus Keunecke (MK): The Eclipse Tomcat Plugin does exactly what its name promises: It integrates the Apache Tomcat server into the Eclipse development environment for easy development and debugging of Java web application. It is a highly focused project, so it is very simple to set up and requires very little system resources.
SF: What made you start this?
MK: The project was originally started by Bruno Leroux in 2002 as Sysdeo Eclipse Tomcat Launcher Plugin and maintained for over a decade. In 2014, however, the plugin became incompatible to recent versions of Eclipse/Tomcat. The project founder had moved on to other projects. So I had a look into the source code and fixed the compatibility issue. While I was at it, I also added a feature to simplify configuration.
SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
MK: The basic philosophy of the Tomcat plugin is, that it should just work. People should hardly notice its existence, although they use it on a daily basis. Think of a very good public transport system that is used by commuters every day.
SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
MK: My project is targeted at Java Web Developers.
SF: What core need does the Eclipse Tomcat Plugin fulfill?
MK: The plugin supports Java Web Developers by integrating Tomcat into the development environment. It enables developers to use Eclipse’s powerful debugging capabilities such as break points, variable inspection and hot code replacement.
While the plugin does very smart work in the background, the user interface and configuration is very easy.
SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
MK: We’ve done a number of small things creating a huge impact. The main idea behind those actions was to make the project easy to be found. For example the project name is exactly the phrase people would use in search engines. We moved from a zip file on a random website to a listing in the Eclipse Marketplace and an update site in the SourceForge file release system.
The SourceForge project makes the project visible to potential contributors by offering a bug tracker and Git repository.
SF: Have you all found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
MK: Yes, releases are a form of free advertisement. Many software directories, such as the Eclipse Marketplace, have a prominent list of new & updated software.
This is of course also true for the community of contributors: If someone goes through the trouble of reporting a bug or even submitting a pull request, they’ll be rewarded by a timely response.
SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
MK: In 2014, I fixed the compatibility issue for myself and my co-workers at HIS eG (http://www.his.de). In addition I added a small feature to simplify my own life. I decided to release my efforts to the public just following the example of the original author.
After a while I was surprised by a mail from SourceForge telling me that the Eclipse Tomcat Plugin was project of the week because of a growing number of downloads. At that time the project files were downloaded several thousand times a week. At first I did not believe the numbers, thinking that most of those downloads were caused by automatic update checks. But the statistics of successful installations from the Eclipse Marketplace also showed huge numbers.
This was the point when we realized that the project is useful to a number of people from all around the world. The SourceForge statistics shows China, USA, Japan and India even above my own country Germany.
SF: How has SourceForge and its tools helped your project reach that success?
MK: SourceForge provides easy access to development infrastructure, such as Git, issue tracking and download service. As a developer of an open source project you can focus on your project without wasting a lot of time on setting up those services on your own.
Since the project is on SourceForge people started to contribute code to the project.
SF: What is the next big thing for Eclipse Tomcat Plugin?
MK: The project was started at a time before automatic testing became popular. It is very mature now and there are little dramatic changes being committed. Therefore adding unit tests was not our top priority. But having said that, the small test coverage feels wrong and creates a bad consciousness.
SF: How long do you think that will take? And do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
MK: It is a long term goal. We can start with adding more tests here and there. Especially target areas that are due to refactoring and changes. Luckily there is no external pressure as this is a purely internal goal.
SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for Eclipse Tomcat Plugin?
MK: We would have moved from providing zip-file on a random website to a hosting service like SourceForge with Git and bug tracker much earlier.
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
MK: We are very happy that SourceForge has stopped flirting with the dark side and has recognized that its reputation is a key asset. Actually we are very impressed that the bad installer was taken offline within the first week after the purchase of SourceForge by BIZX, LLC.