EclipseCon 2009 is over, and it has been great! A lot of things to learn, and even more people to meet. This was my first EclipseCon, and it couldn't have been any better!
Monday started with some great tutorials: Building Commercial-Quality Eclipse Plug-ins in the morning and Advanced Eclipse Rich Client Platform in the afternoon. I'm developing Eclipse plug-ins for about five years now, but still discovered some new stuff (and got some ideas about getting P2 working). Since JCrypTool didn't make it to the open source RCP finals, there was no tension for me while attending the Eclipse Community Awards (Apache Directory Studio totally deserved the first place). The PowerPoint karaoke was a lot of fun!
The following days always contained a good mixture of interesting sessions, from e4 over PDE to the Web Tools Platform and various other talks (I'm not going into detail here). And of course some excellent keynotes, of which I enjoyed The Darwin among the IDEs on Thursday the most. Hopefully we will see some of the ideas announced here in the future. Although I have to admit that I am not a fan of developing everything in the browser. The moment one tab crashes all your browser data is gone. Maybe this will change as well as soon as all tabs are using their own processes. But how will two or more browser instances, each with 250 MB, 500 MB or even more memory usage (remember, we are talking about a complete IDE in the browser), affect the system or even work?
Our Web Tools Platform Incubator session took place on Wednesday at 10:10 am. We ended up in the Grand Ballroom B. 31 people attended (thanks to RFID tracking (hopefully not my passport)). I expected some more, but OK, two brand new incubator projects, the community has still to grow around them. The slides from my session Incubating XML Security Tools are available for download on my home page and of course at gPublication (the conversion killed some of the slides, so better use the one on my home page).
As the statistics show, a little more than 1000 people attended EclipseCon this year. I met the people I intended to meet, and many, many more. And I collected some interesting ideas for XML Security Tools enhancements, which I will look at in detail in the next weeks. So stay tuned.