Eclipse and JavaONE
By Mik Kersten

For those that haven't had a chance to attend the madness that is JavaOne, I think the following picture sums it up. There is a massive amount of people waiting in massive lines to attend massive talks. I snapped this shot while walking into my Mylyn: code at the speed of thought talk. The people at the front of the line had been standing there for way too long and looked very bored. The talk had filled up at pre-registration and had around 700 attendees. But once it was underway, the crowd and questions were great. For those interested in seeing this talk, I plan on recording it and making a webcast available this summer.

For me the conference started with the RedMonk Community One day, which was ridiculously located in a huge hall, in the middle of a never ending lunch line. Amazingly the RedMonk guys managed to get a lively crowd engaged in an RIA discussion, despite the fact that you needed a microphone to speak to anyone more than three feet away from you.

The OSGi, Equinox and SpringSource Buzz
With a lack of interesting announcements from major vendors, the news that dominated for me was the excitement around the SpringSource Application Platform. The SpringSource booth appeared to have a permanent queue of people attached to it and the interest in OSGi was palpable.

Thanks to OSGi and Equinox, Eclipse plug-in developers are already spoiled with a dramatically easier way of building applications and are incapable of going back to a day in which the IDE support did not provide them with this high level of automation at both the language and component level. The Eclipse API Tools are the latest example of that. It's high time that Java EE developers start feeling spoiled by their tool support as well. Tasktop Technologies and SpringSource have been having a great time working together on PDE style tools for server side bundles, and application server vendors are taking an interest in OSGi as well. So we can expect a lot more Eclipse-based innovation on this front.

The Eclipse Party
Other than that the Eclipse party really was great and well attended. Mike Milinkovich mentioned that there were five Eclipse talks at the conference. While I was thrilled that the Mylyn talk was accepted, given the amount of Eclipse interest this number seemed disproportionally small. The response to the Mylyn talk indicated to me that there are a ton of Eclipse users in the JavaOne community and lots of interest in learning more about using and extending Eclipse. Surprisingly, I didn't get any questions on NetBeans during the talk, but while showing the core Mylyn APIs I stated that it is feasible to integrate Mylyn into other IDEs and that we would be happy to support such efforts.

The best conversation I had at the EclipseCon party was with Rod Johnson - not a surprise considering how interesting he is to talk to - but the topic of the conversation flipped from SpringSource tools to having him show me how he's been using Tasktop to manage his work. I got some great feedback on the key usability corners that we're planning to address for the Tasktop Summer release. And that concluded my JavaOne experience very nicely, which in summary was a chance to chat with some great people about building software tools and platforms, get some fresh perspectives, and figure out how we can work together to make our offerings better, cooler, and more useful for the next time the conference rolls around.

Until Next Time,
Mik Kersten
http://tasktop.com/blog/