Digging into the Eclipse Marketplace

Eclipse is an integrated development environment that can be extended with plug-ins. Thanks to Eclipse’s success, a diverse community has been established with members coming from industry, opensource projects, and others, and a marketplace with more than 1.700 different plug-ins developed. Hence, the question arises how this marketplace is composed: Who contributes plug-ins? Which plug-ins are successful? Are there common characteristics or trends? To answer these questions, extensive investigations are necessary. In this paper, we present (i) an initial approach for corresponding analyses and (ii) preliminary results. Overall, we aim to pave the way for further research addressing, for example, motivations to participate in, or the evolution of, open marketplaces.