Eclipse Forum India - Day 2 ...

Random thoughts on today's sessions.

• Around 350-400 people participated today
• It started with Opening Keynote by S&S Media (I forgot the name of the person). He had interesting bullet points. Ex: Java(Language) is the C++ of Java(Platform)
• Next I attended "Introduction to eRCP" by Chris and Wassim. Sweet and short. Good thing is the questions were right on topic.
• After the break, it was Keynote by David from Borland.
  

Personally I love Borland. I started learning programming with Turbo Pascal. Then I moved to Turbo C++. I was running them on a 286 machine. Both were impressively fast and had pretty nice UI (they were running on DOS). Years later, when I tried JBuilder ( version 3, if I remember correctly ) on a PII machine, I was disappointed by the huge number of stuff the IDE loaded which I don't use most of the time. So I switched to the sleek JCreator. After that I never used any Borland product. Few months back I heard that JBuilder is based on Eclipse and was priced above $1000. First thought: they must be kidding! Who will pay such a huge amount when virtually everything is freely available from other Eclipse Projects (WTP, ATP, ...) But after the Keynote (which just had few hints about JBuilder), looks like its worth the money. I'm curious to try it. They have a session here tomorrow on JBuilder and I've planned to attend it.

• After the keynote, I stayed back in the main hall by Criag Russell on "Java Persistence Implementations". I could have attended Mik's session on Mylar, but hey, I love Mylar and its a part of my day-to-day work. Do I really need a session on that?
• On Criag Russell's session, a nice one indeed. He compared the various aspects of the implementations (Toplink essentials, Hibernate & OpenJPA) and had run performance tests. The code is available here. Even when guys like him are working for them, why did Sun come up with something like Entity Beans?
• Next, I went to attend Thilo Frotsher's "Best Practices for Interoperable WebServices". OMG!!! The hall was full; people were sitting in the stairs and more people were standing at all the doors and listening. I'm not interested in other sessions, and went to browse the stalls.
• Sun had a stall and yes they were giving away NetBeans CDs. Sadly no NetBeans Girls ;-(
• After the lunch break, I went back to office to attend an issue. So missed other sessions. Will post more tomorrow.
  

I spoke with Dilip Thomas from the organizers and enquired about the photos, he said they should be available on June 2nd in Flickr.