EclipseCon 2006 Day 3

Comparing Apache and Eclipse

This keynote speech was given by Greg Stein of Apache/Google. Ed Burnette has a good summary.

Morning

I spent the first half of the day giving more demonstrations of uDig. It was fairly quiet in the morning but picked up quite a bit later on. I became acquainted with Alexander Bieber and Daniel Mazurek of jFire. Billy Biggs and Ben Konrath of GNOME both helped me diagnose some of the problems we have been running into with uDig and GNOME. I also met Vladimir Varnica of Omondo. Mark Powell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory stopped by, as he was interested in how uDig converts the AWT BufferedImage generated by GeoTools to an SWT image.

Building a Community For Your Open Source Project

After the exhibit hall closed, I attended Ian Skerret's talk about open source communities. Some good information there, and I can say that his recommendations have been very successful in the uDig community. He is interested in using uDig as a case study as a successful use of RCP.

Short Talks

I then attended a series of short talks:
Eclipse and GCJ/GIJ for Linux: About packaging up Eclipse so that it can be provided in Linux distributions. I should try running uDig in GCJ sometime :)
Managing APIs with the Eclipse API Scanner: This one was quite interesting, and seemed to be a very powerful tool to ensure that an API is always functional and documented, and helps prevent API breakage.

I then attended the poster reception (food and free beer!) with Alex, Daniel, and Martin. I chatted a bit with Duane Ellis, who has run into more internationalization problems than uDig could ever hope to.

BOFs

I attended the BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) BOF. I didn't get much out of it, as it was fairly advanced and I haven't even really looked at BIRT before. There is a possibility that we could use it for printing in uDig.

More interesting was the later Update Manager and Repository BIRT, with several interesting people. A lot of issues about the current update manager in Eclipse were raised, and further discussion will continue on the platform-update mailing list.

I got back to the hotel near midnight and pretty much collapsed.