Last week I spent Thursday evening and all of Friday at
EclipseWorld 2006. This conference is put on by
BZ Media, publishers of
SD Times,
Software Test & Performance, and
Eclipse Review magazines. The 2nd annual conference is mostly geared towards Enterprise software developers and managers using Eclipse technology, although judging by a show of hands in each of the sessions I attended, there were a lot of plug-in developers present, too. While my focus is predominantly in the device software space, the conference was in my backyard (Cambridge, MA), and Chris and Mark were presenting a talk on the
eRCP project (a recent addition to DSDP). So I thought I'd attend.
On Thursday night, Mike Milinkovich gave the
keynote talk, focusing on the "secret sauce" of Eclipse's success and the
Open Source Adoption Maturity Model, of which I have become quite fond. On Friday, I attended the following classes. Here's a quick summary of the content. I couldn't find any online links to the presentations, but I'll update this entry when I get them.
- Eclipse on Cell Phones!? An Introduction to the Embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP) - Chris Aniszczyk and Marks Rogalski. Prior to my current job, the product I helped build contained lasers, multiple embedded processors, and a user-interface on a Windows CE handheld. (Did that pique your interest? Perhaps a future entry.) We started on CE when it was young and had sketchy tooling, but it was fun building portable user interfaces for handheld devices. This talk demonstrated a mobile version of Eclipse's Rich Client Platform capabilities on a couple of Windows Mobile devices running a J2ME VM. If you have one of the supported devices, you can download this stuff now and try it out. You can also run it on a Windows desktop. The graphic capabilities are cool as expected, but I really liked eUpdate - an update manager you can run from your phone to pull down the latest stuff.
- How to Leverage Domain-Specific Modeling Using Eclipse GMF - Anthony Hunter. What do you get when you cross GEF and EMF? Well...you get the subject of this talk. The GMF project has produced some really nice technology since its creation in April of this year. This was my first time seeing it in action. There's still some work to do on workflow, IMO, but in relatively short order, you can create custom graphical editors for visually modeling your specific problem space. This is great technology. Check out the tutorial.
- Best Practices for Managing Eclipse Adoption in the Enterprise - John Kellerman. A subject near and dear to the hearts of those of us who evangelize Eclipse in our companies. In addition to being a good introduction to Eclipse, this talk provided IBM's formulas for internally managing both Eclipse commercial usage and open source contributions. This talk was geared towards companies ranging from Stage 1 (Use) to Stage 3 (Champion) of the maturity model. An interesting follow up talk might be Secrets for Making Eclipse Strategic to Your Organization.
- How to Use and Extend Eclipse's XML and Schema Tools - Craig Salter and Nitin Dahyabhai. This talk covered the XML, DTD, Schema, and WSDL editors in the WTP project. Again, this was the first time that I've seen these tools in action. The design page of the Schema editor was especially impressive, with the ability to graphically define and drill-down into types. These tools also have a catalog in the preferences for creating a local cache of web references to schemas, either standard ones or your own custom schemas.
