FOSDEM (Feb. 4 – 5, Brussels, Belgium)

I’ve never been in Brussels before. I’ve also never been at FOSDEM before. Andrew told me about his plan to generate some nice Eclipse buzz there. Well, it looks like that will turn out great. Mike will be there too. We’ll have an Eclipse stand for people to show some projects and talks about Eclipse and we’ll also give a few talks about Eclipse. Mine will be about EclipseRT.

EclipseCon (March 26 – 29, Reston, Virginia, USA)

Ok, this one is a classic (for me). I’ve been there before. You gotta have to be there! However, this year my flight to EclipseCon will be shorter. The event moved from the west coast to the east coast. Frankly, I always wondered about switching location away from Santa Clara. But I’ll also miss San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city always worth a visit. Yet it took me three EclipseCons until I finally visited it in 2009 for the first time. I may need to find a new event in that area.  Anyway, I’ll give one of the many tutorials there (Dynamic Server Applications with EclipseRT).

JAX (April 16-20, Mainz, Germany)

Also bit of a classic, I like that event. It’s packed with lots of sessions and people. I’ll talk about developing cloud applications with Eclipse Gyrex. Our first major version (1.0) is only weeks away and that talk will be a great opportunity to learn more about Gyrex and see how we use it to solve some interesting problems.

Hope to see you soon at any of the events!

In case you are interested, I’ll give to talks this week. The first one is today in the afternoon and the second one tomorrow.

• Managing large and distributed Eclipse Server Applications
  Wednesday, 17:00, Willhelm-Krämer-Zimmer

• Developing Runtime Applications with Eclipse Gyrex
  Thursday, 15:30, Seminarräume 5

Our three hours tutorial will introduce you to the key concepts for developing web applications with the OSGi HttpService, the Equinox ServletBridge and Virgo. Virgo is new this year and we are happy to have Glynn and Christopher joining us and talking a bit about Virgo.

We’ll also have a great set of exercises. Thus, please bring your laptops with you and make sure its battery is loaded. All you need is a vanilla Eclipse SDK 3.7 M6 and a JDK on your system. But don’t worry we’ll also have a way to distribute the necessary pieces on site.

Monday, March 21st, 9am
EclipseCon 2011, Ballroom A

See you there!

Can’t wait to see you there! Oh and I’ll fly FRA-YYC-SFO this time because it will be SFO-YYZ-FRA on my way back with an overnight stay in downtown Toronto (Friday, March 26th). I’m really looking forward to meet old friends there.

I’m wondering now if modeling solved the problem of cloning. Anyway, I just registered today to be there and watch that happening.

Update, March 21, 5:30pm local time … I’m there.

A few Ctrl+R unveiled some interesting facts.

Anyway, the agenda that Jeff, Martin and Heiko came up with is great. Based on some questions they asked before the symposium they defined topics and also attached time slots to it. At the end, there will be a fishbowl. I don’t know what that is but Jeff’s description sounded interesting.

The crowd is mixed. There are people from many different countries and companies and I heard one guy saying Microsoft. It’s also great to see a lot new faces which actually means that the topic is really attracting new people.

Anyway, I wonder if there is a general place for Eclipse people (committers, contributors, fans) to meet? Something like the EclipseCon table topic but not just at lunch?

I’m now sitting in one about secure OSGi applications. There will be exercises at the end so it sounds like a lot of fun.

Update: If you are looking for the code and slides of the Server-Side Eclipse tutorial they are all in the CVS of the SSE-Examples project on SourceForge.net. For your convenience here are some direct links.

• Slides Part 1
• Slides Part 2
• Eclipse Team Project Set File

It looks like the Hyatt also got a refreshment. I got a renovated room. Seems that flat screen is now becoming standard. So I’m kinda outdated at home now.

#2, #3

Anyway, right in time I got a copy of a brand new book that I want to read. It’s perfect timing since we are planning to build a new distributed reporting platform designed on Server-Side Eclipse and a few other cool technologies. Did I mention that I’m delivering a two-part tutorial about developing Server-Side Eclipse based web applications together with Jochen? Well, now I did!

Obviously it looks better and the usability seems better. I really appreciate that. But it lacks some really important features available in the old system. So while Bjorn asks about our opinions on more transparency in the speaker communication the new submission system is in my opinion a step back in transparency.

Just some question to underline my view:

• How can I watch individual submissions?
• Where is the CC field?
• Where will the program committee votes be visible?
• Where can the community vote?
• What is behind those cryptic mailing list names?
• Where is the change history for a submission?
• What’s the secret about the EclipseCon Wiki that several requested access to?
• Why does the EclipseCon Wiki block community access?
• Where can I download the source code for the new submission system? What about bug tracking and development planning?
• Why is it hosted outside the Eclipse.org infrastructure?

There seem to be really good reasons for the new system. It probably has been developed by an external consultancy. However, do all these reasons really satisfy a development approach which looks closed source like to me?

I’m a bit disappointed now. This is something I didn’t expect. Maybe I’m just too curious and a lot of these items are already on an to-do list. But again, where is this to-do list?