Highlights of EclipseCon 2008

EclipseCon 2008 was a blast! The event was very well organized and full of interesting people who are passionate about technology. I particularly liked the idea of giving everyone poker cards to encourage attendees to mingle by exchanging poker cards to get a winning poker hand by the end of each night.

Here are highlights of some of the events that occured at EclipseCon 2008:

• Scala mini-BOF: Bill Venners (author of a Scala book) and Dave (author of Scala's LiftWeb framework) came from Silicon Valley to attend at the Hyatt bar. We saw a cool demo of LiftWeb, discussed merits and demerits in comparison to Ruby on Rails, and then concluded with interesting discussions of Functional Programming languages (e.g. Haskell) and multi-paradigm languages.


• EclipseCon Jeopardy: the game was played in a theater by members (or founders) of Eclipse such as Ed Merks and Jeff McAffer. It was fun to see the hot competition get squashed by Jeff twice. In the future, I would like to see a similar game where the topics are less oriented at committer rules and more oriented at Eclipse technologies such as RCP and EMF. That way, people from the theater can participate and feel more engaged.


• JRuby on RCP (Glimmer): Need I say more? ;)


• The future of SWT: Silenio and Steve (father of SWT) gave a talk on "a" future of SWT in which they went over where SWT is today, what it is missing, and where it might go in the future. The most noteworthy missing features are a declarative syntax (*ahem*Glimmer*ahem*,) animation, and immediate finalization of widgets. The most impressive part of the talk was demonstrating where SWT might go in the future by showing SWT apps (like Minesweeper and a Flickr photo viewer) rendered as a Flex flash web app, a Dojo Ajax web app, and a Windows WPF app. Does that mean Glimmer ruby apps will suddenly start running online??? ;)

I can go on and on about EclipseCon 2008, but I prefer to leave the rest to other bloggers as there definitely were a lot of them over there :)

Tomorrow though, I will blog about the last two BOFs I attended: E4 BOF and UI and Usability Guidelines BOF.