EclipseCon 2009 conference report (translated from German, Heise Developer)

This conference report by Jochen Hiller, Bernd Kolb and me appeared originally in German at Heise Developer.

EclipseCon: The next version is on the horizon

Hot topics at EclipseCon 2009 were the Eclipse Runtime, Cloud Computing and the next version of Eclipse, e4. The conference showed signs of the financial crisis though.

EclipseCON 2009 EclipseCon 2009 was held from March 23-26 2009 in Stanta Clara, Ca. It was the sixth instance of the conference covering the Eclipse IDE and surrounding technologies. The current financial crisis left its marks. The Eclipse Foundation counted around 1000 participants, that's roughly 30% less than in the previous year. An above-average percentage of participants came from the Bay Area because of limited travel costs. According to the organizers about half of the attendees were visiting EclipseCon for the first time. The conference also had fewer sponsors. The ratio of German companies was surpringly high.

The upcoming release of Eclipse 3.5 will be published at the end of June. It will be called Galileo. Several talks covered the new release. Big disruptive changes are not to be expected, especially not in the platform. The focus is on polishing the existing features. Several half-day tutorials, traditionally on the first day of EclipseCon, presented the New&Noteworthy features, many of them with practical exercises. Some of the tutorials had more than 80 participants.

Busy exhibition, Image source: Hendrik Höfer, MicroDoc

Eclipse Runtime und OSGi

Like last year, the Eclipse Runtime Project (RT) was a main topic of the conference. Project lead Jeff McAffer showed a range of applications from Eclipse Equinox in embedded devices to Eclipse Rich Clients (RCP) and servers. The new p2 provisioning technology can be used to distribute and install components across different platforms, clients and servers.

Eclipse has been using the Jetty web server for the Eclipse help system for a long time. The Jetty team announced the move of the core of the Jetty code base to Eclipse. This will give the Eclipse server technologies additional momentum. The new URL to remember is http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/

Co-located with EclipseCon was the OSGi DevCon. Several talks showed where the OSGi runtime platform is moving: away from embedded applications towards a general platform for all kinds of Java applications. The OSGi Alliance published a new draft of the OSGi 4.2 specification as well as an early draft of the Enterprise Expert Group. A highlight was the first demonstration of the new 4.2 features in early implementations. Composite Bundles support the nesting of OSGi frameworks so that one OSGi runtime can be launched within another. The project leads of the Apache Felix and the Equinox implementation showed how to run one implementation inside the other.

All major representatives of the OSGi Alliance were present at OSGi DevCon, including Sun Microsystems. There were plenty of opportunities to discuss OSGi, JSR 294 (Improved Modularity Support in Java) and Jigsaw. The dispute between OSGi and Sun has not been settled yet and the community is waiting for a final word.

Sun was a gold sponsor of the conference but kept its presence low profile. Sun promoted the OSGi-based Glassfish project rather than NetBeans. The current release of Glassfish attracted a lot of attention. The Glassfish Java EE Application Server is OSGi standards compliant and can be run both with the Apache Felix and the Eclipse Equinox implementation. Glassfish and OSGi is a nice fit that probably quite a few attendess will look into that after the conference.

Eclipse Modeling

Model-based technologies were represented with fewer sessions compared to previous years. This year, the focus was on model-centric approaches using DSLs, e.g. as in the xText project. Another discussion topic was the management and persistence of models. It was interesting to see that modeling is applied more in the U.S. since it is possible to create graphical and textual representations more easily. A big issue is EMF 3.0. It's success will depend on contributions from the community.

e4: Desktop to Web, Web to Desktop

The e4 project combines all activities around the development of the next major Eclipse Version 4. The developers published the second milestone of e4 just before EclipseCon. It demonstrates the use of various technologies. One session showed where e4 is heading, a combination of web and rich client, in both directions. Web to Desktop means using web/Ajax components and giving them access to features of the Eclipse platform. Desktop to Web means the generation of web frontends based on the Eclipse programming model, e.g. by implementing a GUI in SWT and compiling it to ActionScript and a Flash component. This includes the possibility to debug code in Java.

Boris Bokowski, one of e4's main developers, showed how dependency injection can be used in the Eclipse platform so that evil singletons like PlatformUI can be avoided. The future workbench is modelled in EMF. Several sessions discussed declarative UI approaches. A new Eclipse project with that same goal is the Presentation Modeling Framework (PMF).

Styling of the e4 workbench will rely on standard web technologies like CSS. This was demonstrated live in a panel on e4. A member of the Mozilla Foundation participated in this session, showing their approach with the Bespin editor project. Members of the Eclipse and the Mozilla project discussed possibilities for collaboration.

After several review releases this year, a final version of e4 is planned for 2010. Eclipse committers confirmed that the 3.x codebase will be actively maintained for several years. The migration path from 3.x to e4 will be as painless as possible. The new e4 can not be 100% backwards compatible though. Large committer companies like IBM were notably less active in the e4 efforts. E4 will have to rely on support from the community much more than the 3.x stream.

Cloud Computing

Another big topic was Cloud Computing. Two keynotes covered the cloud. Amazon presented their platforms EC2 and S3. Experiences were reported from SmugMug. The network bandwidth used by cloud services has now exceeded the bandwidth consumed by Amazon's e-commerce platform. This looks like a big potential. The highlight of Amazon's keynote was the announcement of the Amazon Web Services Toolkit. A live demo showed how easy it is to install a Tomcat application in the cloud using Eclipse. Even remote debuggind is supported out-of-the-box.

Entertaining keynote, Darwin Among the IDEs, source Anne Jacko, Eclipse Foundation

In a second keynote Tim Wagner and Kevin McGuire presented a vision how IDEs will move into the cloud environment, a humorous and inspiring keynote.

Other talks showed how to use OSGi and Equinox technologies from Eclipse to work in and with the cloud. Further innovation can be expected in this area. Despite the presence of the cloud buzzword, a topic that was missing from the program was the architectural changes required to make applications scale well when running in the cloud.

Drive-by Innovations

Source code management systems were another topic. The communitiy is exploring distributed version control systems like GIT. A panel discussion concluded that in the end the success of the new kinds of SCM systems will depend on the quality of integration into the IDE. For Eclipse, a first integration of GIT exist, called eGit. There seems to be a high demand for innovation. The Eclipse Foundation has been asked to support one of these new distributed SCMs besides the existing CVS and SVN repositories.

All badges had an RFID sensor on the back, hardly noticeable, to track the attendance of the presentations in each room ("anonymously" of course). The data was collected centrally and mined with the reporting component of BIRT. Together with the votes of the attendees, traditionally collected in three buckets good/neutral/bad, the results were presented online.

Audience asking panelists via Twitter, source Anne Jacko, Eclipse Foundation

Twitter was the major communication tool around the conference. The participants posted their tweets live, causing a Twitter storm. Even panel discussion used Twitter - people asked questions for the panelists via Twitter. For many people this was a real new Web 2.0 experience.

The Eclipse Foundation announced Eclipse Summit Europe 2009, the little brother of EclipseCon, to be held in Ludwigsburg, Germany, later this year. EclipseCon 2010 will take place again next year but possibliy in a different format and at a different place. Then e4 will be a really hot topic.