Kudos to organizer Andrew Overholt for pulling off a great Eclipse Demo Camp in Toronto–hosted in Red Hat‘s beautiful (and very clean) new digs on Eglinton Avenue–last night.
Andrew Robinson from Red Hat started things off with a demonstration of some Eclipse-based tools used to drive Koji, the software that builds RPM packages for the Fedora project.
Next up was Brian de Alwis, a committer on the Eclipse Platform UI project, who started with a short presentation describing CSS support in Eclipse 4.x and then wrapped things up with a demonstration of a new “CSS Spy” that should soon appear in the e4 incubator project.
Marcelo Paternostro, a long time committer and contributor on various Eclipse projects, and fellow martial artist, then stepped up to demonstrate the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. He went quickly through that demonstration and ended up spending a lot more time discussing and demonstrating the Sapphire project. Sapphire is very cool; if you’re building SWT-based user interfaces, you really need to spend some time with this project.
Igor Feodorenko gave a demonstration of the m2e project’s Resolved Dependencies view. This view helps you review the full list of dependencies pulled in by a Maven build, and–most interestingly–makes it easy to drill into the dependency graph and sort out why a particular library is included. Igor wrapped up with a quick demonstration of their Onboarding software that’s recently been made open source on GitHub; this software is intended to hasten the process of bringing a new developer onto a project by making it easy provision a complete environment.
Peter Krogh of the EclipseLink project introduced multi-tenancy support by the project. As Peter described, with multi-tenancy, a single schema can be used to represent multiple virtual schemas.
I wrapped up the evening with a brilliant demonstration of the Orion project. There was a lot of interest and feedback. Perhaps the most interesting discussion (at least for me) was around whether or not we intended to move the Eclipse IDE into the browser. Multi-faceted questions like this are a bit of challenge. I used the opportunity to discuss how “he” is a part of “we”, and discussed how the community and committers–not the Eclipse Foundation–makes those sorts of decisions. Then I spent a few minutes musing over some ideas the collective “we” has had bouncing around. I’ll save a more thorough discussion of this for another time (or perhaps for the Orion blog).
The evening was capped off with a trivia contest (with questions provided by Kim Moir) for a beautiful gray Eclipse-branded golf shirt (as recently seen on the runways of Paris), drinks and snacks in the bar across the road, and the coolest cake I’ve ever seen (and I’ve watched 4½ minutes of Cake Boss).
The cake was yummy.
Thanks to Andrew for organizing, and Red Hat for co-sponsoring along with the Eclipse Foundation, a great event!
