Jeff McAffer dropped by the Eclipse Foundation’s Ottawa office on Monday to chat with me about the Runtime Track at EclipseCon 2009. You can listen to the recorded podcast on Eclipse Live.

In the podcast, we chat about the agonizing selection process through which the programme committee managed to whittle down a huge assortment of great tutorial and talk proposals into a set of fantastic tutorials and talks that actually fit into the time and space available. We managed to go off on several tangents and take the discussion into a lot of interesting areas around the Runtime (RT) project at Eclipse.

The Runtime talks fall into several categories. There are a number of talks and tutorials that focus directly on the runtime projects themselves. There are several talk that cover the use of Equinox in runtime areas especially on server side (we do discuss briefly the ambiguity around the word “runtime” as it applies to Eclipse). There are also a number of talks on cloud-based computing, covering tooling as well as running applications (using RAP for example) on clouds.

Naturally, p2—the new provisioning platform—features heavily in the programme: something that’s interesting about the p2 talks is that they discuss uses of p2 that extend beyond it’s use as a bundle provisioner and demonstrate the flexibility of the technology.

The Runtime track’s main stage promises to be fascinating. Jeff himself is the presenter; in the talk, he’ll demonstrate an application that pulls many of the various runtime technologies into a single example. This seems to be a major theme this year: breaking down the silos to show how combinations of the technology can be used in concert.

Jeff talks about the new Equinox book that he’s co-authoring, “Equinox and OSGi: The Power Behind Eclipse” (which may not be the final title), with Paul VanderLei and Simon Archer. As Jeff mentions in the podcast, some of the chapters are already available on Rough Cuts ( I can’t find a direct link, but the search works pretty well Thanks for the link, Jeff). Plans are to publish this book with the upcoming Galileo release this summer (end of June 2009). Jeff is also working on a new edition of the RCP book.

It’s interesting to note that OSGi DevCon runs alongside (and on top of) EclipseCon. If you care about OSGi, you really need to come.

From http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/wayne/