EclipseCon 2009 Day Four Roundup - Reflections

Thursday was the last day of EclipseCon - we know that all good things must come to an end. It seems that it was a great conference, and there's a call to fill in the survey, to help shape EclipseCon 2010. 

Again, thanks to Actuate, we have a view of what was most attended over the day. The Community Project Spotlight looks like it got a good reception. The developerWorks blog has a good summary of this talk: 

What's the future of the Eclipse runtime?

The panel thinks it's pretty bright. It had a rough start but using one programming model across three platforms is a good idea.

What about modeling?

Modeling facilitates communications, so it's a good idea. Germans like modeling, and a large number of Germans are using Eclipse (laughter)

 

How will e4 going to effect the direction of the platform and will that be a good thing?

e4 group has opened up development to all, and the participation is good. Without e4 the life of platform's life is limited. The community is critical to extend the lifespan of any project. What is being added to e4 today will be relevant to all of its users. There may be an unexpected explosion in the RCP use. e4 gives Eclipse an opportunity to break out of being just a tool.

Is the Eclipse hype over?

Eclipse has gone from the shiny new toy phase. Hype is difficult to measure. People building things in Eclipse is more important than hype. e4 will generate interest. Eclipse is not shiny and new to insiders, but there are many people who haven't discovered it. There is a wide group of people who have not discovered it.

For e4, will there be a compatibility layer for people writing code for an in V3.5?

Try e4. Stick with the APIs. Stay away from internals. Eclipse is a platform, and there is an implied promise of stability

Ian Skerrett has been doing some video interviews, first with Arun Gupta from Sun, about their partipation at EclipseCon, and the Eclipse plugins for GlassFish and JavaFX.  Ian also did an interview with Wolfgang from itemis to find out exactly what xText is. Wayne Beaton has also been doing some interviewing - here is  Alexandra Imrie from GUIDancer discussing how to use their tool for testing your UIs. 

It's good to see all the slides for the talks becoming available, for those of us who couldn't make it. The Swordfish team has all their slides available online at http://www.eclipse.org/swordfish/learn/papers.php he guys at ReviewClipse, a plugin to help with your code reviews, have also put their slides online. And Kai Todter has uploaded all the slides and tutorial projects from his EclipseCon sesssions

• Advanced Eclipse RCP slides (6MB)
• Advanced Eclipse RCP tutorial projects (Download the src zip file)
• RCP Mail 2.0 (All tutorial steps and slides)
• e4 css styling demo slides

Heiko Seeberger has posted up this EclipseCon slides, while Ben Vitale and  Michael Spector have written up their summaries of EclipseCon. Michael actually poses a very interesting question about ECF's Real Time Shared Editing: 

There where things that I'm not convinced still in their necessity. For example, who will need a Real Time Shared Editing? Don't tell me about pair programming. I'm in doubt that simultaneous typing can have some benefits. Usually, it's one who's typing and another who's staring at the code behind the shoulder.

I've got my own ECF article in the pipeline, where I'll try and provide some examples of where this is useful. Stay tuned! 

Not quite related to a specific EclipseCon talk, but well worth reading is this article about how to add p2 self updating support to your RCP application. 

If you were at the conference, please fill in this survey to help  2010's conference even better.I think the use of Twitter was pretty good for EclipseCon - hopefully next year it will be even better.