EclipseCon, day 3

The day started with a talk of Greg Stein about open source and Eclipse. Well, I mostly agree with some people that was commenting that he did not say anything specially new, interesting, or that was not already known. It was a good introduction for those of the attendees that were not familiar with open source world, but nothing more. The conclusion can be, BSD license or Apache license, make your choice just now, because you're going to end at that point.

Next, I was on the OS pavillion until 3.15 PM. Not a really very busy day on the pavillion, and everybody was telling moreless the same. If we forget the break points, at some moments on the pavillion there were only the exhibitors and some friends. I see this a normal thing, and something to improve on the next versions of EclipseCon. My personal suggestion is to have an exclusive day for the exhibitors, with some receptions to attract people or something similar. Just like in the tutorials day but with exhibitors. Why? Very easy, this year if I was attending to the EclipseCon I will be sure on the talks and BOFs instead of going to the exhibitors. Personally, I prefer to learn from the experts than to going to see products. So I suppose that many people made the same choice.

After the OS pavillion was closed, I could finally go to enjoy some of the EclipseCon talks. First, I went to the Eclipse RCP application best practices panel. It was an interesting panel with some good tips. Then, I dropped myself on one of the short talks ballroom, and I saw really interesting products. I specially liked the speak about back in time in debugging. It was really shocking to see how with a ruler the speaker was able to go back and forward in time on a simulation. Really cool. I also should drop a note about Hannover. I posted on this blog about Hannover more than one (near two?) years ago, and I did not see anything new on the project look and feel. I suppose that one year ago they were announcing only a simple GUI fake. Anyways, there is no official release yet for Hannover.

After this, I was on the reception talking with Alex, Daniel and Richard, and with some other people too. And we went to the BIRT BOF. Ok, I really wanted to go to the jBoss IDE BOF, but nobody was there. So, I'm not a BIRT user, but I really learnt a lot on the BOF. The fact, is that I made a quick test to BIRT, some time ago. Even these days I'm having some visits on this blog due to the comments I made. For me BIRT is a great tool, and an interesting choice as it seems really powerful. The only problem with BIRT is the Eclipse dependency that can move people further away from using it, and also that is not as standard as could be a XML/XSL/FO/SVG/... based solution. Ok, this last solution is very laborious but it is standard. I also do not like the dual licencing from Actuate respect to BIRT, but that is another subject. Personally I don't like, I feel my self very skeptic, when a company offers two different flavours of the same product. Yes, I know the idea "the base is free", but for me the idea is "we can do better things but you are going to pay for them".

Next I was on the Update manager and Open Source BOF. Well, many update manager topics and few open source topics, but it was great. Many interesting people and many advanced topics. In summary everybody was claiming that the update manager currently is very simple for the needings of a company, and that means that it should have metadata support, better dependency checkings, ability to do smart bundle downloading, create centralized repositories, etc... Jeff McAffer also told us some tips about the new update manager support, and it will be really interesting to see Pack200 in action. Thanks to this BOF, finally, I had the opportunity to meet Philippe Ombrédanne. He is the founder of nexb, and well, some months ago we had a couple of emails because he was really brave enough to be able to run jLibrary 1.0beta3 version! Something that is really a merit.