EclipseCON 2008: News from the collective

In no particular order, here's what I've learned from this year's con:

• p2 is going to rock (though it's unfortunate that Pascal's slides aren't online yet -- hint, hint!). While my first view of it was a bit disappointing, the new story -- including backwards compatibility for existing Update Manager sites, the ability to generate the new metadata from the old stuff & shared bundle pools (akin to C:\Program Files\Common Files or /usr/share/) to improve the functional-but-hackish alternatives -- promises to make things not just different, but better.

• Modeling is not just alive and well, it's everywhere!

• While some people have Planet-blog-photo-angst, it's not enough to stop the onslaught diversity. :)

• ant4eclipse looks like a possible stripped-down approach to pde/basebuilder, for tiny projects like the microcomponents planned for Nexus or the stuff on Eclipse Spaces. Something to explore, anyway.

• The Modeling build has lots of room for improvement -- some great suggestions have been logged and added to my list, including the use of JET to templatize and wizardize creation of new .releng projects. The same should be said about my tutorial, which I think would have benefited from a more overarching introduction before the hands-on work began.

• The Google Summer of Code 2008 is just around the corner. Have a great idea you want to see built at Eclipse, but don't have time to do it yourself? Suggest it and mentor a student instead!

• Martin Taal has some great new web-based form UI functionality that I'd love to use for the UIs I do (eg., for builds or for Dash).

• I'd also like to start playing with BIRT in Dash, and not just to earn an animated t-shirt, since I think that ship has, sadly, already sailed.

• TaskTop, or Mylyn on steroids, is pretty damn cool as a way of integrating everything I do into one UI. Because of networking issues w/ linux this week, I've only been able to test it with Windows... which means, sadly, the embedded browser experience sucks a little because it's IE, not Firefox. Still, the idea of having a context for web and local files I'm working on all in one trackable, toggleable interface, with connections to GMail and Google Calendar makes the whole thing very slick. If the linux experience is as good or better, it's only a matter of time before I buy a copy. $60 is pretty reasonable for something that will, ultimately, support Mylyn's continued growth. (Though you don't get a "Friends of Mylyn" logo.)

• WinXP + Eclipse + Flock + Pidgin + Cisco VPN client = BSOD, even though Windows Loves Java, apparently. (To be fair, this one was the Cisco VPN client's fault.)

• I want an IBM Access Connections for Linux. Switching between the Hyatt wifi network and the Eclipsecon network via text file updates and shell scripts sucks elephant balls compared to just magically switching networks with no effort. Am I missing something? Is there some better x-, k-, or gnu-based app I could be using?

• I should be using Platform Releng Packager instead of custom-packing zips after signing them. I recall vaguely hearing about this last year, but haven't had a use for it until now, with Master Features and signed builds.

• It's possible to generate test coverage documentation from JUnit using Bumblebee.

• If your project doesn't already define a How To Contribute document, it should.

• Using the Autopin tweaklet with Mylyn is probably a bad idea, as it introduces a lot of manual labour (pinning tabs by hand). This has been preventing me from getting the most out of Mylyn.

• Denis & Karl have outed me as being not one person but an array of clones. I'm just not sure how to define the syntax for identifying which clone is which... suggestions? (This is clone #1, or $nick[0], nick:0.) The process is still imperfect, but I hope to be able to open source it one day. If you're curious about how it's done, all I can say is that it involves division by zero.

Thanks to everyone at this year's con -- planners & attendees alike. We[] had a blast.