So, EclipseCon 2007 has wrapped up today. Some final thoughts.
- The conference was well attended and organized. Near as I could tell, everything went off without a hitch. There were some problems accessing wireless from the Hyatt, but I was only out there once. The food and booze was good. And, yes, I packed on a couple more pounds with the ever-present cookies and brownies. Ugh. Conferences. Sheesh.
- Eclipse used to be just an IDE for developing Java applications. Now, it's so much more. It's now a really, really good IDE for developing Java applications. It's also a platform for applications to run on top of (see Eclipse RCP) used by tools like Azureus and the Actuate BIRT Report Designer. Even more, the Eclipse Foundation brings together all the projects and makes sure that everything is legal and structures. When you say "Eclipse", you really are saying a mouthful.
- The conference had the expected amount of talk focused on Eclipse and a variety of the extension work being done either directly in Eclipse, or as a plug-in, or on the platform.
- All 3 of the Keynote talks were very good and entertaining. None of them focused on Eclipse or the Eclipse ecosystem, but they were all very good nonetheless.
- Additionally, I was pleasantly surprised to see all the focus on OSGi at the conference (OSGi was formerly the Open Services Gateway initiative, and is now the OSGi Alliance). There were numerous really good sessions talking about the current progress of the OSGi Alliance and related projects. This stuff is finally maturing. Lots of Open Source technologies available now, like Equinox, Knopflerfish, Apache Felix, and Newton. There is even talk about getting Spring and OSGi working together with the Spring-OSGi project.
Looking downstream, however, it may make the most sense to combine OSGi, Spring, and SCA (the Service Component Architecture) to form the best-balanced service fabric. Paremus appears to be leading the charge here, and announced such a product, Infiniflow, at the conference. Very cool.
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