Congratulations to the Eclipse Award winners! I'm particularly pleased that EGit project has won the most innovative new feature, though clearly I'm biased. Congratulations also go to the other winners Sebastian Zamekow (top committer), Dariusz Luksza (top contributor), Boris Bokowski (top newcomer evangelist), David Williams (lifetime contribution), e4 (most open project), and of course all of the finalists.

Tuesday kicks off with What is Watson? which looks at http://www.ibmwatson.com/ and how it performed on Jeopardy (@IBMWatson).

There's plenty of good OSGi talks on today; Robert Dunne from Paremus is talking about Distributed OSGi and Remote Services Admin (ECF has recently added Remote Services Admin too). Jeff McAffer and Paul Vander Lei are talking on 10 signs you're doing OSGi wrong, or “OSGi worst practices”, a complement to last year's “OSGi best practices”. The afternoon brings an update on the OSGi EEG and Declarative Services in OSGi. I'm also interested in the incubating Apache Celix, which brings OSGi to C – there's talk later on Celix, universal OSGi?. There's also the OSGi BoF/reception tonight, amongst other BoFs.

There's much more at EclipseCon than OSGi talks, though; These ARE the classes you are looking for on bytecode manipulation is an interesting under-the-hood investigation on how AspectJ and EclEmma works; if you don't know about Orion yet (and you haven't read my InfoQ post yet) then there's a introduction to Orion; and managing open source projects like Growing an open-source project and Donating a mature project to Eclipse will be useful.

Finally, one I'd really like to be able to attend is P2: Saviour or Achilles Heel – provisioning on Eclipse should be far simpler than it is. Witness the plethora of content that's duplicated on Eclipse (the existence of Eclipse Packaging Project is an admission of defeat that provisioning works out of the box). I'm sure there are things that can be done better, but whilst the technical underpinnings of P2 might be appropriate, there's no high-level minimal bootstrap installer that works out of the box and can acquire all additional features. (No, the SWT installer is not what's required, which installs a “fresh eclipse”. We need a minimal Eclipse RCP style application that can isntall features into itself, not into a random new location.) Whether this P2 talk will give hope for the future or not remains to be seen.

There's also a lot of other talks which are worthwhile if you haven't covered them before, such as project coin's changes to the Java language, Mylyn Reloaded, BIRT to the bare metal and many more. The problem, as always at EclipseCon, is that there are too many good choices and not enough time to see them all ...