I’m at Google IO this week. The big highlight for me today was the relatively short set played by Jane’s Addiction during the after hours party.
Truth-be-told, I am also pretty stoked about the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet that was given out today. I’m looking forward to seeing if Orion works on it (but–unfortunately–the connectivity has been pretty spotty, so I haven’t had a chance to give it a try).
Speaking of Orion… that one of the main reasons we’re here.
There was a steady flow of visitors to the Eclipse booth where we have been showing off Orion. Orion is a new effort by the Eclipse project to build a browser-based IDE. The fidelity with the browser experience has been particularly popular today: Orion is a browser-based application. It doesn’t try to fight the browser paradigm and enforce an IDE paradigm, but rather offers a very browser-friendly experience. With Git support!
I did have one interesting question today that caught me a bit off guard: I was asked how I would convince an Eclipse developer to use Orion. The answer is simple (but comes with a long explanation): I wouldn’t. There is a group of problems out there in the world for which a browser-based software development strategy using Orion provides the right fit. Similarly, there is a group of problems for which Eclipse is the right fit (and, I suppose that there is also a group of problems for which emacs is the right solution; weird, but right). Over time, I can envision these different groups overlapping more and more, especially if we get to the point where Orion is a front-end for a server-based Eclipse back-end. How cool would that be?
So, Orion is cool. But so is Eclipse.
Of course, Indigo is coming and there is no shortage of Eclipse fans wanting to take a look at what’s new in this release. I demonstrated WindowBuilder, EGit, and Mylyn for a handful of our guests today; everybody seemed to agree that Indigo has a lot to offer Java developers. FWIW, Mylyn isn’t especially “new”, but a few unfortunate folks who had never experienced Mylyn happened by the booth, and I felt a need to make their lives better…
It was a tiring day, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
