We wrapped up the Eclipse PluginFest last night and by all accounts people were very pleased with the outcome. 18 companies, 4 Eclipse projects and around 45 individuals attended the event at the Symbian offices in London. Most of the attendees were from the key vendors in the embedded and mobile market.
The objective of the PluginFest was to test the compatibility and interoperability between different Eclipse-based products. When we first started planning this event, I was a bit dubious how something like this would go? It turns out that things went really well. A lot of the products just worked. For example, plugins from Perforce, Subeclipse/Subversion and Klocwork got great results when added to a variety of Eclipse based IDEs. Some of the testing sessions uncovered issues but in many instances work-arounds or resolutions were identified. The results of the testing were posted on the Eclipse wiki.
Another great thing about an event like this is the networking opportunities. There were lots of hallway and white board conversations throughout the two days. One comment from an attendee was that ‘I would have had to travel for most of the year to meet everyone I did here’.
The general consensus was that we should do this type of event again. I would love to do it again and coming back to London next year would be great. Thanks to everyone for attending and thanks to Thibaut Rouffineau from Symbian for hosting and sponsoring the event.
