Eclipse Summit India - Days One and Two

Before I start, a question: How do you know you are in troubled economic times?

Today is the first day of Eclipse Summit India. Luckily, even after screwing up by taking a wrong road and going in a different direction, I did make it well before the keynote by Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft. They are one of the Platinum sponsors. Just like me, everyone was wondering what are they doing there, the answer told was "interoperability". I'm not going to summarize any of the topics presented, so I'll leave you to guess what how he positioned M$ in that.One thing that was interesting is they have PHP as a first class citizen in their IIS. That was surprising for me. Additionally they have some thing called a 'One Installer' which will download all that you want for a web site and install it on your server - not just PHP module for IIS or the latest .Net runtime, but Wordpress and Drupal as well! Wow!

After that it was Ilya Shinkarenko's workshop. It was good. Started a little slow and the pace moved up during the session. I've to cut it in the middle and rush to the other room. Adobe guys were just finishing their presentation. Both of them had a black Mac book and even before I said another 'wow', I noticed it was a windows machine with an Apple sticker. Good idea, I should say. The presentation was mine, and I hope it went well. I did get some good feedback during the lunch. Its definitely troubled ecomony now, but the buffet was good :-)

Post lunch, yeah, I'm in the EMF workshop and blogging this (yeah, we got free wi-fi). Got to run for Ankur's Presentation. Rest of the sessions in the evening/tomorrow.

Before I sign out, the answer: In the free goodies for attendees, you get a pencil instead of a pen ;-)

Day Two

The second day, I was a little late and missed the Oracle's Plenary session. I was in time for IBM's session. Being an IBM-er nothing new for me there to see RAD or websphere. It was good.

The first session I took was by Ilya Shinkarenko. More than half of the hall had repeated audience. It was nice, just as yesterday. This time, I was able to attend till the end. After a heavy lunch, I felt very sleepy in the afternoon session. The presenter was partly responsible for that ;-) Then I moved to Anshu Jain's session called 'Eclipse as framework of frameworks', which was simply awesome. To quote Ankur, "a lot of meat added with a perfect aroma, the presentation was a feast". Of the ones I've attended, that was the best. Next was networking in the corridor. After many questions on Eclipse startup to command invocation, that marked the end of the day for me.

Some afterthoughts:

(*) The good thing about this conference is the focus. This is not an all-in-conference, which targets all the CEOs, CTOs, Managers, decision makers, IT guys and your office boys. This has complete focus on Eclipse plug-in developers and almost all of these sessions are well aligned towards this.

(*) Parallel tracks are good, but they could have been specific tracks like OSGi, EMF etc. Also there were instances like both the OSGi sessions were held in parallel, so if someone is interested in OSGi, they have to choose between these two. Probably the next time, it gets better.

(*) The venue was also much better, center of the city and well accessible. No need to talk about the food, it was great :-)

I believe that the photos, videos and the slides will be uploaded online soon. I'll post a link once its done.

From http://blog.eclipse-tips.com