Eclipse Now You Can 2007

I’m back from Eclipse Now You Can 2007 which took place in Paris, last Friday (october 12th). This is a short summary of the day.

Morning : 4 conferences

Eclipse Open Innovation Network (Mike Milinkovich)

Mike presented the Eclipse ecosystem, with figures, membership system and current members (I really liked the screen full of company logos :-) )

He explained how companies, even competitors, can collaborate on the Eclipse platform (thus sharing costs) and compete on products, the thing their customers really care.

He also showed that for 4 consecutive years, Eclipse has shipped the new release exactly on time, the 28–30 june.

Eclipse Europa (Mike Milinkovich)

Mike presented the latest Eclipse release, the new features and the release train system and which make it easier for end users to get Eclipse up and ready.

A lot of people in the audience did not know about Mylyn, Mike (and then Wayne) urged everyone to try it as soon as possible. Being a Mylyn user mylsef, they’re right : -)

Someone complained about the lack of documentation for plugin development, Mike answered “did you buy the books ?” :-) explaining that thy were the best source of information.

Short Welcome and Introdution (Eliane Fourgeau)

This was supposed to be the firsts words of the day but, because of traffic jams, there was some delay.

IP at Eclipse (Janet Campbell)

Janet presented the due diligence process at Eclipse, why and how submitted code goes through several verification steps, looking for potential copyright problems.

Companies must be sure that they won’t have problems with products based on Eclipse. This process is very unique in open source software.On licence compatibility, most open source licences are compatible with the EPL, with the exception of GPL and LGPL.

RCP (Wayne Beaton)

Wayne explained the basics of RCP( plugin system, Equinox, …), with an exemple application.

There was only a few lines of code in the slides, but I saw some interesting informations on how to create custom presentations and context-sensitive Help.

Jazz (Philippe Krief – IBM)

This presentation was about Jazz and Rational Team concert. A very cool demo showed us Task tracking, continuous builds, SCM and unit testing, all thightly integrated with each other. Another nice thing was workspace building which can automatically create the eclipse workspace you need to make the change you have to do.

The default SCM is ClearCase, but Jazz will be able to use subversion too.

Lunch

After the morning conference, it was time to wander between all the sponsors stands, to speak with other participants.

I talked to Wayne Beaton, showed him the Nebula Gallery Widget and ShareMedia. :-) and to Janet Campbell about the IP log and how we should do it in Nebula.

Instantiations was presenting it’s WindowBuilder Pro : a GUI building tool for SWT which seems to be far better than Visual Editor. This is a commercial product but they are giving free licences for open source projects.

See also XAML on SWT on Wayne’s blog.

Guess why the room was called “girafe” :-)

There were 2 workshops in the afternoon : business applications and Embedded software. I was in the first one :

SOA (Dr. Ricco Deutscher)

It was a presentation of Eclipse Swordfish, the new Eclipse SOA project developed by Deutsche Post, IONA, and individuals. v1.0 is planned for 2009

Eclipse Modeling (Stéphane LACRAMPE)

A feedback from development using models and code generation at Unedic. By creating domain models and several eclipse plugins (based on EMF, JET and Acceleo Pro), they are able to generate complex applications from model instances and code templates.

Eclipse Link (Shaun Smith and Stephan Eberle)

(I forgot to take a picture during this one, sorry.) Shaun and Stephan showed how Eclipse Link can be integrated with EMF in order to use a database for models instances instead of files. The result is better scalability and team support using locks.

This was a little more technical than the previous presentations. It has some nice informations on JPA, the Dali project and EMF.

Model Driven Software Development for Embedded systems (Dr. Lothar Wendehals and Benedikt Niehues)

In this presentation could have been in the other workshop because of the embedded part. We saw the pro and cons of model driven dev vs text based and the differents solutions for modeling in Eclipse.

Conclusion

This was a nice day, full of valuable information and it was the first time I met someone from Eclipse. Cool :-) I was not able to attend to Eclipse Summit Europe, and I missed most of the sessions that were streamed on the internet. Going to ENYC reminded me I should really plan a little better to be sure to make it to ESE.

I probably forgot to write a lot of things here (I wrote 10 pages of infos during the day). Feel free to add comments.