Christopher Frost

Eclipse Summit Europe 2010

Between moving house and going on a long holiday my personal projects went a little quiet but I’ve been at the Eclipse Summit in Europe in Ludwigsberg this week so I thought I’d write up my thoughts.

This was my first ‘big’ Eclipse event, on the one hand it’s nice to have so many knowledgeable people around but on the other hand I felt the level of presentation had to much higher than normal to impress. I certainly enjoyed all the ones I went to.

I talked about Eclipse Virgo as a part of the RT tutorial and gave a new talk about our Snaps prototype for modular web apps. I even managed to shift give away 50 memory sticks with Vrigo and STS on. This was really well timed due the new release of Virgo going out this week.

I think the things I’ve taken away from the sessions are:

• Go and have a play with EGit, seems to have come a long way, will be interesting to see if I start using it day to day after getting so comfortable with the command line Git and GitX.
• Jetty is really cool! Seems to have a lot of work done to help it scale & perform well, wonder how v8 will stack up against Tomcat 6 in the performance stakes. Really looking forward to using it in Virgo and maybe playing with some of the newer features for the Virgo Admin Console.
• The Emma code coverage tool hasn’t been worked on in years but there is a new project keeping the good work going, EclEmma. The thing that really got me interested in the Ant integration.  I’m wondering if it can be integrated in to the CI build and fail it if the code coverage is too low.
• Finally, integration into Eclipse 4.x of OpenSocial gadgets. Made me smile. I’m trying really hard to think of a good gadget that I will want in Eclipse. Maybe something that looks up web based docs for various languages…

Overall I had a great time and the social side was fun too. Good to put faces to names I’ve been talking to but never met in real life. There was some interesting dancing going on with the band on Wednesday night. Looking forward to Eclipse Con 2011 now.