Well, I am just about to pack it in and head to Tokyo’s Narita Airport for the flight home to Ottawa. The place is going to be a madhouse, as today is the start of Golden Week and is the largest travel day each year in Japan. Not very good planning on my part.
The enthusiasm for Eclipse in Japan is enormous. Everywhere I went, people knew all about it. In particular, there were many people who knew about several Eclipse projects, not solely our Java tools. There is a lot of interest in and use of CDT and TPTP, for example.
One of my favorite meetings was with Kazunori Mizushima, Eclipse supporter extraordinaire. About two-and-a half years ago, Mizushima-san first used the Eclipse JDT and fell in love with it. He noticed that there was a real lack of materials available for Eclipse in Japanese. So on his own initiative, he created eclipsewiki.net — a Japanese language wiki devoted to Eclipse. His site is now getting 6000 visits per day.
His latest accomplishment is authoring a Japanese book on Eclipse 3.0, that was just released last month.
It is the dedicated and energetic developers like Mizushima-san that really make the Eclipse community something special. Meeting people around the world with that kind of enthusiasm sure is a lot of fun.
