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EclipseCon 2016 Day 1

2016 Eclipsecon Conference Eclipse

Today is the first day of EclipseCon, the premier conference for all things Eclipse. But Eclipse isn’t just an IDE – in fact, most of the growth in Eclipse has been in non-IDE and other parts, from the Internet of Things to the Sciences. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the conference has a much greater variety in recent years than in days gone by.

Sadly, I can’t be there in person, as I’m at QCon London, now in its tenth year. I’m hosting a track on Wednesday on Modern Native Languages and even the digital world can’t quite let me be in two places concurrently. But I’m with you in spirit 😃

If I were at EclipseCon, I’d be having a whale of a time. No doubt I’d have started off by helping Doug close the bar, although in reality I’m probably getting to old for that kind of thing. There’s also the excellent conference app – every conference needs to have a mobile application. It makes it a lot easier to find out what is there.

Fortunately, InfoQ is recording some of the sessions at EclipseCon, so I’ll be able to catch up with some of the presentations. I’d expect that they’ll be available sometime over Summer.

Today’s content at EclipseCon is the tutorials; for all things IoT, there’s a Shoot-A-Pi and Eclipse Vorto to communicate between Raspberry Pi devices using CoAP. (Eclipse still has the Omega Problem in naming projects, primarily due to trademark uniqueness.)

Of course, there’s also a lot for the language nerd to enjoy; if you’ve not got into Xtext there’s a whole tutorial on eXXXtreme programming wiht Xtext and friends (from the newly created Xtext company TypeFox).

There’s also a lot on Eclipse 4, runtimes and JavaFX for those looking at desktop applications.

But Eclipse has grown up - it’s also available on the cloud with Docker and building great HTML5 applications using Angular.JS

The real problem with EclipseCon? There’s only 24 hours in a day.