Heiko Klare
Senior Manager Software Development at Vector Informatik
Eclipse Committer & Project Lead
About
I am a software engineer and engineering manager who enjoys bringing research, industrial practice and open source together, with one goal in mind: making developers' daily work better.
Today I lead a team at Vector Informatik in Karlsruhe that keeps the Eclipse Platform a stable basis for PREEvision. Much of that work goes directly into the Eclipse open-source projects, where I am a committer and project lead. Before joining Vector, I spent six years as a software engineering researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and I still stay close to research through workshop program committees and guest lectures.
At Vector
I am responsible for making sure that the Eclipse Platform and the other dependencies from the Eclipse ecosystem serve as a stable, reliable basis for PREEvision and our IDE tooling. We achieve this through internal development and, above all, through contributions to the open-source projects themselves. My team and I take care of:
- Continuous platform updates – automated processes for updating Eclipse and validating each update, so PREEvision stays current without putting stability at risk.
- Making the most of the ecosystem – adopting more of what the Eclipse ecosystem offers instead of maintaining our own workarounds.
- Developer productivity – keeping the Eclipse IDE fast and dependable for the whole PREEvision engineering team.
In open source
- Development – committer and project lead of the Eclipse Platform, and contributor to other projects such as JDT, Tycho and GEF.
- Community – member of the steering committee of the Eclipse IDE Working Group and lead of the Eclipse Planning Council; speaker at EclipseCon 2024, Open Community for Tooling 2026 and other Java and software development conferences.
- Innovation – initiator and lead of “Initiative 31”, a cross-company evaluation of an enhanced, sustainable implementation of Eclipse SWT that emerged from the vision work of the Eclipse IDE Working Group.
Highlight: HiDPI scaling for Eclipse on Windows
We wanted PREEvision to look sharp on every monitor, whatever its scaling. We chose to develop monitor-specific scaling for Windows directly in the open-source Eclipse Platform, knowing that this meant ensuring compatibility for every existing application based on the Platform, but also that all these applications would benefit from it.
Today, every Eclipse-based product and the Eclipse IDE look sharp and correctly sized on every monitor. This is a great enhancement for every user on Windows. Along the way, we adopted Edge/WebView2 as the modern browser engine of SWT on Windows and added SVG support, so icons stay crisp at any scaling. I had the pleasure of driving this project to success together with several colleagues inside and outside of Vector.
Research and teaching
My doctoral research at KIT's Institute of Information Security and Dependability (KASTEL) dealt with keeping multiple models of a software system consistent by composing modular, reusable transformations. I led the development of the Vitruvius framework for view-based software development. My dissertation (2021) was awarded a distinction and nominated for the GI-Dissertationspreis and the Ernst Denert Software-Engineering-Preis. My publications are listed on Google Scholar and dblp, and on my KIT alumni page.
I am still connected to the research community. I serve on the program committees of workshops on model-based engineering, such as the Model Management workshop (MoM) and the (In-)Consistency Management in Modeling workshop (ICMM). I also give guest lectures at universities that connect model-based engineering research to its practical use in PREEvision, as described in the article From Theory to Industrial Systems Engineering Practice.
Career
- 2026 – todaySenior Manager Software DevelopmentVector Informatik GmbH, Karlsruhe
- 2023 – todayEclipse Platform Committer and Project LeadOpen-source role alongside my position at Vector
- 2024 – 2026Principal Software Development EngineerVector Informatik GmbH, Karlsruhe
- 2022 – 2024Senior Software Development EngineerVector Informatik GmbH, Karlsruhe
- 2021 – 2022Postdoctoral ResearcherKASTEL, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
- 2016 – 2021Doctoral ResearcherDr.-Ing. in Computer Science · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
- 2010 – 2016Computer Science StudiesB.Sc. and M.Sc. · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)