There’s something about the Java Forum Stuttgart conference that I really like. The conference is a little on the large size (I believe that I heard that there were 1,200 attendees) which gives the exhibit area a really busy feel. Good busy.
As a speaker, I can’t say enough about this conference. They take care of us. Every year they get us great gifts. The best part is that the gifts tend to have some local tie-in. This year, they gave us coffee and tea from local providers. It came with a little booklet that, if I could read German, would tell me all about the company and how it is a cornerstone of the Stuttgart business community. That personal touch is nice. It also helps that they assign me my very own personal assistant (who I assume is the very own personal assistant for a couple of other folks). This year, she remembered my Modelleisenbahn hobby and had a map ready for me pointing out the locations of local stores.
My talk went very well. I presented Mylyn to a standing room only crowd (apparently there were about a dozen people in an overflow room). Here’s what they looked like from my perspective.
I decided to mix things up a bit this time through and started with a demo. I went out on a bit of limb and just started implementing part of the solution for bug 237658. The first thing I did was create subtask for this bug. With Mylyn 3.0, new tasks (or subtasks) can be created for a repository without actually submitting them (which was handy as I didn’t notice the Ethernet cable which I’m sure would have given me Internet access if I had thought to try it). So I created the subtask and just started into changing the Expenses (EBERT) application to channel change events through the Equinox event framework. I plan to submit the new subtasks to Bugzilla and check the code into a new branch sometime soon (I’m feeling a little lazy right now).
I asked the audience to try not to get too taken by the Equinox stuff and focus on the task-oriented development process (I really did want to get them thinking a bit more about Equinox and the Examples project). In the process, I managed to show off the Bugzilla integration, and the Über-cool context-based filtering. I wrapped up with a quick pass through the slides to reinforce what I demonstrated. The net result of the demonstration was the same as last year: I felt like a rock star. People love Mylyn.
One of the disturbing take-homes from the session is the number of developers who apparently do not use an issue tracking system of any form. Mylyn supports, Bugzilla, JIRA, Trac, XPlanner, CodeBeamer, and more. But there were a lot of questions about how Mylyn can be used to share tasks without a repository (I showed how you can drag tasks out of the Task List view onto the file system and then from the file system into a different workspace’s Task List; I guess that works).
I rounded out my week by talking about Ganymede with two different audiences. The first audience got to listen to me two hours after I got off the plane. It was not one of my best performances. The crowd today in Zürich seemed to have had a better time; clearly a few extra hours of rest make big difference.
I leave you today with a picture I took of Doug Clarke from the EclipseLink project from last night’s Stammtisch.
It’s good to be king.
