Folks, this has been a fantastic year for me. I’m sure everybody has had some things on his personal roadmap. Mine started with quite a big challenge. I decided to leave the company I’ve been with for the last 6 years for some time abroad with a new company.

Was it worth it? Absolutely! Today, I have much more liberties when developing software. Actually, I can base the new architecture of our next generation software platform on Eclipse technology and that’s so awesome.

In January, I also delivered my first talk at a public conference ever. This was quite an interesting experience. Although I like blogging about my work and my life I’m not a guy that usually acts in the public. I’m more one of those organizing behind the scenes. 😉

In February, one of my patches was committed into the Eclipse CVS repository and a few days later I received a bunch of Eclipse Installed stickers from Wayne. 🙂

March was probably the month with the most fun. A new city, some new stuff and a lot of great days. In fact, I’ve met a lot people I knew from newsgroups, mailing lists, chats and other activities for the first time. It was really fantastic. I can’t wait for the next EclipseCon. 🙂

There was an interesting discussion in April and it’s great to see that the discussion is still ongoing in 2007. June was the time for the first simultaneous release of ten Eclipse projects ever and in July the Eclipse Ecosystem started exploring the space.

In July I also started exploring GWT (the Google Web Toolkit) and came across an Eclipse plug-in. I started extending it in August and it’s still a nice project I look at from time to time. 🙂

In October, I attended the Eclipse Summit Europe in Esslingen. I participated in the Server-Side Eclipse Symposium but I never thought that the topic would be so well attended. It looks like everybody in interested in adopting Eclipse technology on the server. Well, I’m doing it too for our software platform.

Oh and I don’t know how but in 2006 I managed to blog at least once every single month. Cool. 🙂 I leave it up to you do decide if it’s of some use for you. 😉

So what’s next in 2007? Mhm. I’m working on some great stuff in the area of autonomous and distributed computing based on Equinox and Eclipse ECF. Then there is also my project which I recently renamed to RWT – the Remote Widget Toolkit. It started as a Google Summer of Code project. The idea is to develop only with one single toolkit for RCP and Web clients.

All this together I tend to call Eclipse REP – the Rich Enterprise Platform. Eclipse Server-Side is just the technology. Eclipse REP is the framework on top of it. Curious? Post a comment here or send me a mail if you are interested in contributing or adopting. Some of the stuff is already on SourceForge but a lot is still prototyped in a few local workspaces. 😉