So I head for SFO in the wee hours of the morning and thought it would be worth jotting down a few thoughts and observations. Here they are in more-or-less random order.
Eclipse was very well represented at JavaOne. For example, it was amazing the degree to which Eclipse showed up in the keynotes:
- In Sun’s keynote by Jonathan Schwartz, Research in Motion provided a demo of an Eclipse-based J2ME toolkit.
- In Oracle’s keynote by Thomas Kurian, Oracle announced its proposals to lead two additional projects at Eclipse: Java Server Faces and BPEL.
- In BEA’s keynote by Mark Carges, Eclipse was highlighted in the tooling demos.
- In Nokia’s keynote by Pertti Korhonen and Jon Bostrom, Eclipse was shown in several different ways. First, as the basis for Nokia’s J2ME tooling. And in what I thought was the demo of the show, they demonstrated creating and deploying a SWT/eSWT application which ran on both a Nokia 9300 and Windows. Very cool.
- And last but not least, IBM’s keynote by Robert Leblanc mentioned Eclipse in several places and demo’d AspectJ and AJDT.
Another interesting note: Bjorn and my talk was in the top ten (#7) for all the sessions on Monday. We probably would have done better if they’d been able to count all of the people they turned away.
One of my personal highlights was quaffing a few ales at the Thirsty Bear. I had heard so many stories about the original Eclipse community gathering there some years back. Eclipse’s presence at JavaOne has certainly come a long way since then. It was great to actually see the place. My personal favourite was the Polar Bear pilsener.
I had a interesting conversation with a fellow who was a huge fan of the Eclipse Web Tools project. He has been using it since WTP M1 to build internet banking applications and is very very happy. Quote: “You have no idea how much I love your tools.” Hats off to WTP!
I met a few of the folks from NetBeans at the show. Seemed like good guys.
The Eclipse passport and t-shirt giveaway in the exhibit floor was a huge success. I think over 500 “I use Eclipse” t-shirts were handed out.
I found it amusing that Eclipse’s booth was in the far back corner of the exhibit hall. Who was in the other extreme back corner? Microsoft. Hilarious.
The only downer note that I’ve had all week at JavaOne was when I read Dan Farber’s blog post where he quoted James Gosling saying “However, modules created for NetBeans won’t be supported in Eclipse. “Where do you draw the line–should we be donating engineers to work on DB2?,” Gosling asked. “IBM is funding Eclipse 100 percent…“.
How very sad to see such nonsense from a community leader.
James, any time you want to chat about how the Eclipse Foundation and its community is supported by its over 100 member organizations, drop me a line at mike at eclipse.org. Or at least read my previous post on Eclipse independence.
