Martin Lippert

Pivotal

What do you do?
I work as a Principal Software Engineer for Pivotal, the company behind Cloud Foundry, the Spring framework, Groovy/Grails, RabbitMQ, Redis, and more. I work in the tooling group, which implements and ships all the Eclipse integrations for those projects, like the Spring IDE for Eclipse, Groovy-Eclipse, the Grails IDE, the Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse, etc. We also ship the Spring Tool Suite as well as the Groovy/Grails tool suite, which are ready-to-use distributions of the latest Eclipse release + our add-ons pre-installed. My main focus is on the Spring tools. In addition to that, I am thinking and working on cloud-based developer tooling as the logical next step beyond the traditional desktop IDEs that we use today. I am also project lead of the Eclipse Flux project, which describes and implements a new architecture for cloud-based tooling and builds a bridge between desktop IDEs and cloud-based developer tools.

How long have you been using Eclipse?
I've been using Eclipse since version 1.0 (released a long time ago). I used Eclipse as an IDE, but quickly adopted it to building business applications on top of the plugin model (which wasn't even OSGi back then). I also implemented the first load-time aspect weaving implementation, which was based on the AspectJ bytecode weaver implementation, and I integrated it into the Eclipse runtime. This evolved over time, got re-implemented for OSGi, and is now part of the Equinox project (and still serves as a foundation for the JDT weaving hacks). I followed the OSGi foundations of Eclipse for a long time, used OSGi in various environments and helped people adopt that technology. Then, I switched over to implement developer tooling on top of Eclipse.

Name five plugins you use and recommend:
For people who are using Spring I can, of course, recommend to install the Spring Tool Suite components... :-) Personally, I like to keep the installations as small as possible, therefore I don't have specific recommendations for plugins.

What's your favorite thing to do when you're not working?
I try to spend as much time as possible with my kids, my family, and my friends. I love to go to conferences and I did a few triathlons (olympic distance, not these crazy iron-mans) in the past. I should start training again to participate in the triathlon in Hamburg next year. We shall see... :-)