Each year the Eclipse Community Awards recognize some of the best Eclipse-based products.   Out of the thousands and thousands of applications and tools built on Eclipse, a panel a judges selects a small number of the ‘best’ products  in a variety of different categories.

This year we have added two new categories: Best Modeling Tool and Best Mobile Tool.   I am constantly surprised by the number of modeling products being built on Eclipse.    The products include traditional UML tools, business process modeling tools, enterprise architecture tools and more.   Some of these products are from small startups and large establish players.   Mobile development is a ‘hot’ topic for the entire industry.  A lot of the major vendors are using Eclipse as the platform for their tools chain. There are also lots of startups doing very innovative tools to simplify the mobile development process.  Both categories have lots of interesting innovation occuring, so we thought it would be interesting to recognize some of the leaders.

The other two categories this year are Best Developer Tool and Best Application.   In previous years we have split the Best Application  category between RCP and server-side Equinox.   This split sometimes created confusion, since a lot of applications have both client and server, so we decided to collapse into one category.

The success of the Eclipse Community Awards is getting lots of great nominations from the community.   I want to encourage vendors, open source projects and passionate users to nominate the products you believe are the Best in the Eclipse community.   Vendors should feel free to nominate your own products, since I am sure they are the best.  :-)   The nomination deadline is January 28, 2011.  Winners will be announced at EclipseCon on March 21.