My Wishlist for EclipseCon 2009

In just two weeks time EclipseCon 2009 will be kicking off in Santa Clara. Based on what I saw at this year Eclipse Summit Europe, this years conference is bound to be the best yet. Here are just a few of the talks that I'm looking forward to.

• Runtime (r)evolution at Eclipse
  Any time Jeff McAffer is involved in a presentation, you know it's going to be interesting. Here's what Jeff had to say about the talk at his blog.
  
  The Runtime (r)evolution talk combines the problem with the experiment. In a sense, the talk actually a long demo that paints a vision of what you can do with Equinox and the runtime technologies from Eclipse. Folks from Equinox, ECF, RAP, BIRT, EclipseLink and EPP are pitching in to showcase their technology.
  
  So if you're still not sure about where Equinox fits in, or where it becomes useful, this is the talk to go to.
  
  
• Catching Up With e4
  The importance of e4 cannot be understated, and to support those who want to find out more and get involved there are a number of talks around e4. A good place to start is e4 Project In Review, along with e4 UI In Practice. The UI related talks are bound to be interesting - showing how e4 can be run using RAP and SWT Browser Edition.  Make sure to see how the e4 UI is backed up by a model in The Modelled UI in Eclipse e4.
  
  
• Single Sourcing: Extend your RCP Application to the Web with RAP
  The Rich Ajax Platform is pretty powerful. This talk will cover how you can migrate your RCP source code to being a RAP project, enabling the application to run in a browser. I saw a talk on this topic at ESE2008 and was quite impressed by the potential of RAP.
  
  Sticking with applications and user interfaces, Tom Schindl will be showing how to create impressive RCP applications quickly in Mixing Eclipse Technologies to create Enterprise Ready Database-RCP-Frontends. 
  Finally, Real World RCP looks fantastic - there's nothing like a good case study to convince you to use a technology, so how about four case studies in one talk!.
  
  
• OSGi for Eclipse Developers
  Here you'll be able to find out a lot more about OSGi and see how it can help create properly dynamic and modular systems. Find out more and leave some feedback on what you'd like to see at this talk on Chris' blog.
  
  
• The Unbearable Stupidity of Modeling
  This is a great talk from Ed Merks, where he outlines the misconceptions about modelling, hopefully helping you to see how useful modeling really is.
  Clearly modeling is doomed to failure, unless of course these are all misconceptions... In fact, they are exactly that.
  

If lucky enough to be attending the conference, make sure to take advantage of all the great things that are going on, from the BoF's in the evenings, to the bewildering choice of tutorials on Monday.

To keep up with the goings-on at EclipseCon, make sure to stay tuned to EclipseZone. You can also follow the conference on twitter through the #eclipsecon tag. A full list of Eclipse twitterer's is available on the Eclipse wiki.