I just got back from Eclipse World in NYC. This was the first year for Eclipse World and it seemed people very please with the results. They had a strong program and all of the sessions were well attended. Some of the highlights from the session I attended were:
- John Arthorne did a great job explaining RCP to a full room. I think he really opened people’s eyes to have easy it is to create RCP applications.
- The best keynote was from Patrick Kerpan from Borland. He started out saying Eclipse is going to be ‘a de-facto application platform’; acknowledging that other platforms will exist. I tend to agree that Microsoft isn’t going to back away from .Net anytime soon. He also did a great job explaining how and why competing ISVs can collaborate on a common platform. I had one ISV come up to me after the keynote and said that he now understood how their company could participate in Eclipse. I just hope Patrick keeps doing this presentation at other venues….
- Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel did a talk on using GUI builders to build Swing, SWT or RCP applications. They did an interesting comparison of Visual Editor, Jigloo and their own product WindowBuilder.
There were lots of other sessions that I wanted to see but did not get the chance. The one thing that surprised me was the interest in RCP. There were at least 4 sessions on RCP and all of them seemed to be full. It was great to see, especially since a lot of the attendees were from large enterprises.
The exhibit hall had only 14 vendors but for the size of the conference it was a good fit. For the first time, I also got a chance to see a live demo of IBM Workplace Client technology. They are doing some cool stuff.
All in all a week well spent in the big Apple. BZ Media is doing it again next year in Boston. An event I would recommend checking out.