Eclipse Forum India - Day 3 ...

Todays tidbits:

• Neal Ford's "10 ways to improve code" was good. One of this bullet items: Use IntelliJ. The money you invest in it will be compensated by the 4 days of developers paid time to configure Eclipse. 4 days to configure Eclipse? I'd create a small & fully functional plugin in that time
• Vishal Puri's session on Spring 2.0 was nice. If he had added few slides on AOP, it would have been better for the audience
• In the non-techie topic "You can't buy an open source community", Neelan Choksi said, if some projects weren't open source, it might not have been this successful. In the examples he mentioned Eclipse. I don't think so. I think there are two reasons that mainly pushed its wide spread adaptation are:

1. PDE bundled with the default download. Any Eclipse user (at least a Java Developer) who wants to try out plugin, don't have to download anything.
2. Usability of PDE. Anyone can create a Hello World plugin and run it in less than 5 mins. That gives a good start.

• I visited Parasoft's booth for more details about SOATest. I happened to see a demo of JTest as well. Its a nice Eclipse plugin that helps in testing Java code. One of the main features they emphasized was the ability to automatically create the test code based on the program's logic. The tool browsed thru the code of a method for the if/while/for constructs and generates different test cases for the different values. So you write the code, generate the test case on the logic and verify your code whether it works? I don't understand! What do they call this? Test Last Development?
• Impiger has an online contest. Try it out here.

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.

Eclipse Forum India - First Impressions ...

Finally EFI is here. Here are some of my random thoughts:

• Totally around 200 people were present for the power workshops today. Around 700 expected for main conference
  
• I attended the one by Chris and Wassim (Eclipse Plugin Development). Total strength for this was little less than 100
• Chris had a excited + curious million $ expression when he was asked to light the lamp. I wish I had a camera to capture that Kodak moment :-)
• The people who attended were from various backgrounds. Only few haven't created a plugin before
• The session was just started and the slides were explaining what an extension point is, and there were questions about ant based build, buddy class loading, osgi services, etc...
• There were exceptions as well:
  
  Attendee: Does Eclipse use JFace?
  Chris : Yes.
  Attendee: Great!
  
  
• In India, only 19.26% people bring laptops to the conferences. Source: my survey ;-) But this time it was little different. Almost 50% people in the hall had brought their laptops. The workshop had some exercises and those who didn't have laptops, were simply reading the pamphlets for the 253rd time.
• During coffee breaks, there was a huge crowd around Chris and Wassim. I think the only way to move the crowd out of them was to bring Shilpa Shetty to the stage
  
• I didn't attend the other sessions. Few guys were shuffling between all the sessions. They said the other sessions were equally good.

Notes to the organizers:

• The session started late by 30 mins. Please try to stick to the time
• If the attendees need to bring laptops, please inform it earlier
• Please arrange some sort of network or pre-distribute the necessary artifacts. We had to pass on a USB thumb drive for this
• Whoever decided that the "bag" was a good one, please, please change your mind !!!