Eclipse India Summit 2009 - My Experience

It been more than a week, and I have been meaning to write about it. FOLKS, this is by all means the best event that I have attended in my professional life as a software developer. The entire program was crafted in a way that provided me with opportunities to move about from in depth workshops to less intensive focused sessions. I attended both the workshops by Ilya Shinkarenko.

In the first workshop Ilya showed how to make a simple RCP application flexible with OSGi Services, extensible with Extension-Points and achieve production quality leveraging from advanced concepts like usage of Adapters, JFace Data Binding, Presentation API and, finally, deploying the product with P2 provisioning mechanism. In the second workshop we had a look at OOP design patterns from another perspective: how this or that pattern is used in Eclipse and what are the possible advantages or pitfalls.

The focused sessions I attended included the one from Anshu Jain - Eclipse as a Framework of Frameworks. He took a very simple example to motivate the idea of framework architectures, and how one could easily conceive and build frameworks without much effort. The latter parts took the above concepts to explain the eclipse architecture, and also explained how the eclipse framework is intuitively a "framework of frameworks", and that too a very powerful one.

I also attended Ankur Sharma's Eclipse 3.5 PDE Target Platform Story and found the new look platform story very compelling. Another excellent session was the one hosted by Shaun Smith. We have been looking at harnessing Java Persistence 2.0 at our organization very recently, and this talk came as a blessing.

Overall, I had a very fulfilling experience at the summit and look forward in eanest to attend the next edition. I heard from Saltmarch, the organizers that they will run this as an annual feature. So bring it on in July 2010 if not earlier.

GUIdancer 3.1 released

Version 3.1 of GUIdancer is now available for download. As well adding support for the testing of GEF (Graphical Editing Framework) components, the new version is available for MAC OSX as a beta, and is compatible with Eclipse 3.5. Increased platform and application support are not the only areas where the Eclipse-based test tool has been expanded. GUIdancer's efficient keyword-driven approach has also been extended to improve the testing of dynamic tables. Learn more: http://www.bredex.de/

Going to Eclipse India Summit

The biggest summit for the Eclipse ecosystem is coming to Bangalore, India, July 17-18. More info here: http://www.eclipsesummit.com/.

It has a first rate agenda, some excellent speakers (both International and local flavors), and is being held at the Chancery Pavilion, a 5* hotel in downtown Bengaluru. I wouldn't miss it for anything. Stay tuned for the summit related posts.