EclipseCon 2011 Highlights

Another EclipseCon has come to an end.  EclipseCon is always fun, busy, exciting, exhausting and leaves me in awe of how great the people are in the Eclipse community.  Here are some of my highlights from the week.

Launch of Orion and OrionHub

This was the big launch for Orion. I was pleased with the results.  We held a planning meeting the Thursday and Friday before EclipseCon at SAP.  Kevin Dangoor of Mozilla has a great summary of the meeting and Orion. Notes from the planning meeting are on the wiki.  We also received a number of press articles about Orion which are also available on the wiki.  I was also very please with the feedback we received on the Orion home page; it is looking pretty good.

Community Awards

The community awards is always a highlight for me.   There are so many people, projects and companies that do great things in the Eclipse community, so it is great we can recognize a few.   I was especially pleased Dariusz Luksza was able to make it Santa Clara to receive his top contributor award.  Dariusz was a Google Summer of Code student working on EGit.  He lives in Poland, so he wasn’t going to be able to make it to EclipseCon but the Google SOC office was kind enough to pay for his travel cost.

I was also very happy that David Williams received the very first Lifetime Contribution Award.  David is the key driving force behind the release train.  He is an incredibly important member of the community so I am glad he was recognized.

New Product Showcase

New this year was a product showcase during the Wednesday night reception.   We had 20 companies and projects showing off their new (in the last 12 months) Eclipse based products.    The demos were so popular I could not get a chance to see a lot of the products.   The winner of the Hot New Product award was the Chronon Time Travel Debugger. I also got a chance to see the very interesting Butterflyzer alpha, MDS Eclipse support for PhoneGap and Android, the eBay Tumeric Eclipse plugin,  and Compuware’s Mainframe Workbench.  There were a lot of products I wanted to see but they were too busy.   It seemed like the showcase was a success and something we should do next year.

Keynotes

I enjoyed all three keynotes.  Watson was pretty geeky about natural language processing, nice to see IBM and Oracle sharing the stage talking about OpenJDK and I really enjoyed Todd Lipcon’s introduction to Hadoop [slides].  Hadoop and big data is huge, so it was nice to get a really good technical introduction.

I hope everyone else enjoyed EclipseCon.  We at the Foundation are always interested in hearing feedback about how we can make it better.  Feel free to send me an e-mail or leave a comment.   Don’t forget to to complete the attendee survey.

From http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/eclipsecon-2011-highlights/