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Better late than never

07 11 09 - 20:58 O.k. it is one week ago, but a lot of things kept me from blogging about the Eclipse European Summit 2009. I know there are a lot of blogs around which still have commented about this excellent event. But because this was my first ESE I certainly have to drop some lines about it.

First I thought about writing some comments about every talk I visited. So I started taking notes in every session. But very quickly I felt like a student again. So I stopped writing and just listened - actually the better decision. So I will keep it short.

The first session on Tuesday was a must. Ed Merks, Eike Stepper and Tom Schindl gave talks about EMF, CDO and Eclipse Data-Binding. Very interesting stuff, although some parts were already familiar to me. I like the way Eike designs his slides. He has a good feeling for colours and forms. (I am not only saying this because he is my project lead).

Then I was a bit disappointed that the tutorial about "Scala and OSGi" had to be cancelled because of illness. I was very excited about this talk because I had not time yet to have a look at Scala.
I was surprised that Microsoft was that present at the Summit. They were giving the first day's keynote speech, sponsored the "Liberty Café" and the "Stammtisch" and presented how Eclipse can work together with Windows 7, Azure and Silverlight. There was also an interesting talk (not from Microsoft) about bridging EMF and Microsoft's Modelling Platform OSLO .

Sure, the Microsoft guys know how to make presentations. But I can't help myself - every time I see a presenter on a big stage with a Microsoft logo in the background it reminds me of a huge rubberball jumping up and down.

One of the most interesting sessions at the whole ESE was the BoF about Papyrus. Not only because I gave I small overview about Dawn :) Well, I am definitely no UML or modelling expert, but I have the feeling that Papyrus has what it takes to become an important project inside the world of modelling. I personally like the idea of combining also those cool modelling tools in one workbench which is designed to let them all work well together.
The third day started as cool as it ended with a talk about Papyrus. Also interesting was the presentation about XWT, which allows describing applications with an XML syntax. This could provide a nice separation between UI designers and the model developers.

The last talk I watched (aside from the closing session) was a perfect ending for the summit. Four guys from Purple Scout talked about possible problems in threaded UI environments. The show-stopper were the three guys who played concurrent threads and demonstrated potential conflicts with a lot of flying tennis balls.

There were still a lot of cool presentation to talk about but I promised to keep it short ;)
To sum the summit up: The talks were interesting, the people very cool, the food was very good and the drinks were free - I'll be there next time ;)