EclipseCon 2009 Day Two Roundup

Tuesday was the first day of proper talks at EclipseCon. One of the coolest things that I've seen is the session reports courtesy of Actuate. Seems like a great way to track the popularity and attendence of the various talks. Looking through the top 10 most attending talks, it seems like the e4 project is the hot topic of the day.

What better way to catch up with the meaning of e4 than to go to the e4 Project In Review talk, which many people did. The purpose of e4 should be pretty clear now - to rework through the platform to make Eclipse runnable on the server, embedded devices and the cloud, as well as the desktop. The guys from Mozilla Bespin gave a demo mixing their technology with e4's.

There should be an e4 v0.9 release in July 2009, which will signify a move from prototyping and experimentation into development. The first release of e4 will follow in Summer 2010. Exciting times, and once again, more community involvement will help make this a real success. 

Modelling

Modelling is another very popular topic around the Eclipse community. Florian has written a great blog entry of the modelling talks that he's been following. 

In the end I got a good impression how the next major release, Galileo, is currently build using model-driven development tools: model-to-model transformations (QVTO) and model-to-text-transformations (XPand) are used in order to assemble and build all the milestone builds for Galileo. So, it seems to me that more and more areas are open to modeling and I'm already looking forward to the talks on this topic tomorrow.

Jan from itemis, who I mentioned yesterday as new partners of the Eclipse Training Alliance, has also blogged about the talks that itemis have given at the conference. Seems like it's standing room only at the modelling talks! There's a xText BOF happening this evening - according to Ed Merks it's "the coolest new thing" - so make sure to get to the BOF to find out why!

Announcements

There were quite a few announcements today. Firstly, Oracle announced their Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse was available.  This set of tools will make it easier for Eclipse developers to work with JPA based projects. Instantiations, fresh from their success at the community awards as Best Commercial Eclipse-based Developer Tool, announced Window Builder Pro 7.

Mik Kersten, from Tasktop & Mylyn, announced two new connectors for Mylyn with Atlassian's Crucible and Bamboo products.  Sun have also released a pre-release of their GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse. This is a great step in getting better GlassFish integration into Eclipse. 

According to people on Twitter, Sun have the best tshirt giveaway at the conference. Looks good to me!

Other Talks 

Benjamin Cabé's talk Eclipse in Action looks very cool - controlling a Lego Mindstorms robot and integrating all of this into Eclipse using DSDP Target Management. 

Martin Lippert's slides from his talk on  "What's New in Equinox Aspects" are online here as a pdf.

Neil Bartlett's tutorial slides from Monday on Component Oriented Development in OSGi with DS, Spring and iPOJO are also available. Kai Toedter has also made his tutorial on Advanced Eclipse RCP available.

Over the coming weeks, more slides will become available on gPublication.