EclipseCon 2006 Day 4

I skipped the Borland keynote so I could pack up my stuff and get ready to return to Victoria. I started the day with a talk on Testing Applications Using the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) which included an amazing demonstration of automated GUI testing. TPTP is definitely something that requires more research and contains many interesting elements including manual testing, performance testing, execution histories.

Next was an Overview of RCP GUI Building Tools for Eclipse, which was a little dry, consisting of PowerPoint slides of point-by-point features of Visual Editor, WindowMaker and Jigloo. I think a demonstration would have been better. I snuck out before the finish, so I probably missed any demo, if there was one.

Had lunch with Martin, and we took the jFire, jLibrary and uDig placards and merged them all into one "Open Source" table. The table actually filled up and we met a couple new people, including Ira Heffan, who gave a talk titled "Getting your Plug-in Legal: A Primer for Eclipse Developers" which I wish I had attended rather than the GUI tools one. We all chatted about open source projects and the reasons for choosing licenses. Also met Dicky Johan from hippojump.com who is working on interesting agent software. Also at the table was Jens (didn't catch his last name or what he worked on) from Denmark and we had a great exchange on the issue of Hans Island.

I then shadowed Philippe Ombrédanne from room to room. This guy gives great talks! His first one was a nine minute long rant about Eclipse entitled Top ten Eclipse Annoyances. He then briefly talked about ten great, strange or weird open source plug-ins and RCP applications. Applications that he noted that I think warrant further investigation are Mylar (of course), eclipseutils, abbot, RSSOwl and anyedit. He then joined John Kaplan and gave a long talk about Contributing to Eclipse that detailed the process of successfully reporting, fixing and submitting bugs and feature enhancements to Eclipse.

Last was a talk by Jeff McAffer regarding best practices for programming Eclipse and OSGi. I was fairly tired at this point and had trouble following along, but of the topics I did notice, we are following them already in uDig. I said good bye to Alex, Daniel and Martin, had some Thai food and made my way to the airport. The flight itself was quite an ordeal. Despite numerous setbacks, I made it to Seattle early.

That was a fantastic conference and I am looking forward to hopefully attending next year.