My first EclipseCon - a story from the cloud

This was my first EclipseCon. As a few months ago I started working on Atlassian Eclipse Connector, it was time to get to know Eclipse community and also promote a little bit the whole project, which last Monday reached it the first public beta release.

We had a poster session about the project and I must admit I was very positively surprised how many people came to ask or talk to us about this project. Also the whole concept of poster reception is a great thing. While serving yourself delicious food, you could in a very informal style chat with various people on topics which interested you. Folks were also coming to say just to us “hello”, as they really like us and the way Atlassian does its business. I was really proud of it.

Interesting thing is that almost nobody currently does code reviews in their companies (although almost everyone would love to or plans it). Even more astonishing is the fact that still a lot of people does not use continuous integration or even have no idea what (and what for) continuous integration is. Finally interesting thing is that only less than 5% of people (one hand raised as far as I noticed correctly) admitted that they had some automated UI tests for the tools/systems they write on or for Eclipse platform. And again, most of people plan to use such tool in the near future (this is maybe why significant part of exhibitors offered UI testing tools).

From technical point of view I have the following short conclusion about current trends:

• web-based IDE: +1,
• cloud computing: +1,
• SOA: -1

More precisely:

1. Eclipse IDE is heading towards web browser. Yes. With e4 project and a lot of activities around stuff like RAP we may expect that in a year or two we will have most of functionality available currently on the desktop client will be available also in the web browser.
2. SOA time as a buzzword is gone. SOA talks were the ones which were rated the worst and had poor attendance. SOA books were the one which stayed on the bookshelf at the bookstore unbought. SOA seems to be this topic which finally bothers people rather than brings money. It seems that it's the time when SOA was finally called for action: it has to stop claiming how valuable and great it is (feeding endless SOA gurus and consultants) and rather start proving it in reality.
3. Cloud computing is a new trend. Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) was one of the hottest topic (including very interesting keynote). Unfortunately for many people it does seem to be yet another buzzword. I've seen examples of the systems which used cloud computing probably only for cloud computing sake. How cloud computing will change the landscape it is still hard to tell. However it seems that the recent release of Bamboo with it EC2 support may contribute to verification of the future of this stuff.

EclipseCon was yet another conference where some people used word “agile” to make topics of their presentations looking more sexy and attractive. IMO they always failed. Their talks had usually nothing to do with “agile”. Still “agile” seems for some a new key for success. Yes I agree, contrary to some 3-letter buzzword it means concrete valuable thing, but it won't help you if you just put it on your slides or session subject without really understanding and applying it in your organization.

Sessions which I would probably remember the most:

1. The Social Mind keynote. Really interesting presentation and discussion about social soft aspect of writing scalable software. Refreshing, non-obvious and encouraging. Well done guys.
2. Jetty@Eclipse. Great, technical presentation of Jetty in the context of its recent move to Eclipse foundation. Many interesting observations and examples of web server scalability, threading issues and asynchronous ways to cope with normally thread-blocking operations. Besides, the talk was really convincing (including awesome examples with Maven Jetty plugin) in its claim that Jetty is the best servlet engine currently available. Good job Greg Wilkins, Australia FTW!

I would summarize EclipseCon 2009 as a very good conference, but for one thing: the attendance. It was clearly visible that the organizers had expected much more people. A lot people did not show up, some talks were canceled or rescheduled. Some rooms were left unused, some were almost empty. It was quite depressing. Some EclipseCon veterans admitted that comparing to the previous year the number of attendees dropped maybe even by about 50%. I hope that this is only due to The Crisis and everything will be good again soon (next time).