I spent last week at JavaOne in San Francisco, and I thought I would share a few things about the event that might be of interest to the Eclipse community.
First I should mention that I thought the buzz at the conference was the best that I’ve felt for years. It was certainly the best since Oracle acquired Java, but it was also better than the last couple of Sun-run events. Back in those days, all the loud music and hype on the planet couldn’t hide Sun’s lack of vision and investment in the Java platform. I’m not saying that everything is perfect in Javaland, but things are certainly moving in the right direction.
On one hand, it would be fair to say that there wasn’t a lot of Eclipse at this year’s JavaOne. The Eclipse Foundation did not have a booth in the exhibit hall. There weren’t a lot of sessions, and Oracle does seem to love to talk about NetBeans. Other than 10-year-old Aditya Gupta’s “hacking Minecraft” demo in the Thursday community spotlight, I don’t think there was a mention of Eclipse in any of the keynotes.
But in some ways, this was the best JavaOne for Eclipse ever. In fact, there was Eclipse inside a couple of the most talked about projects at the show.
- Did you know that we (sort of) won our community’s first Duke Award? The Open Home Automation Bus (openHAB) project was recognized for its creative and innovative uses of Java technology. You can read more from Kai Kreuzer’s blog post.
“Contributors to the openHAB project have developed a Java-based home automation solution, which includes a runtime based on the Equinox OSGi runtime and Eclipse Jetty web server and a scripting language for easily defining automation logic. openHAB provides a central integration point for developers to integrate devices and applications into the solution.”
If this sounds familiar, it should, because within the next couple of weeks the core of openHAB will be moving to Eclipse and becoming the Eclipse Smart Home project.
- In the opening JavaOne keynote, and again in the Thursday morning IoT keynote at OpenWorld, Oracle highlighted a very cool people counter M2M application developed for the conference by Eurotech and Hitachi which used doorway sensors to track the movement of people through the conference. The application was built with Java, OSGi and MQTT technologies. In other words, it showcased Eclipse Paho (MQTT), Mosquitto (soon to be Eclipse Mosquitto), and the OSGi-based device gateway frameworks which Eurotech has proposed to contribute to the Eclipse Kura project. The M2M/IoT community at Eclipse is growing very quickly, and it was great to see so much of its potential being highlighted at JavaOne.
So all-in-all, I would say that the Eclipse community played a low-key but darn cool role at JavaOne 2013.
