March 27, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

Call me crazy, but it was a proud moment when they delivered the name tag that went on the door of my first office. It just felt so official, even almost 7 years ago. Rummaging through some papers on my desk just now, I was surprised to find that the flyer for the IBM Reception at EclipseCon listed all of the IBM presenters attending the conference. There were quite a few of them…wait a minute…NOOOOO!

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »

March 16, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

Eclipse 2007 was a unique experience, despite being in the exact same location as last year’s conference. I think it was a far more user focused event than the previous two years, signifying a possible shift in the demographic that Eclipse is reaching. Also, it was the first where I was presenting without much guidance from my mentor, David (although thankfully in partnership with Amy Wu). And then there was the Sumo wrestling…

Sunday

As is usual for me when traveling, I pack almost directly from the dryer into my suitcase. This has the unfortunate effect of keeping me up late into the night and ensuring that I arrive at the airport groggy and grumpy for a trip that would have me in the air for at minimum 7 hours. I remember not getting much sleep last year, either. Compounding all of this is the usual anxiety that someone who only speaks publicly once or twice a year is bound to have. I did have the forethought to spring for a new set of headphones that I could wear comfortably for the entire day. I had worn a set of Sony MDR-Q22LP headphones the last time I was on a plane, spring-loaded over-the-ear clip-ons that are perhaps the most comfortable I’d ever found, at least to me, but they were terrible at keeping out any background noise. To my surprise, noise canceling earphones have come down in price quite a bit and the pair I’d picked one up a few days earlier proved to be quite handy. Besides isolating me from outside noises it also canceled a fair amount of the engine noise of the plane. Even sitting next to the engines on the second leg of the trip, it made the time fly by (with the help of old episodes of The Office , to which I’d finally relented to watching and was enjoying tremendously). Being able to take a much-needed nap in peace didn’t hurt, either. Arriving earlier in the day than I’d expected, I had dinner in the hotel bar with some friends from Red Hat and then tried to get some sleep for the big day ahead.

Monday

While we’d completed our presentation before leaving for the conference, I was still unsure of their contents. As with the slides I’d used for EclipseWorld 2006, it was tricky to find a balance between putting in just the talking points and putting in large amounts of technical detail that would make for useful reference later. Chris Aniszczyk had mentioned in the IRC Committer channel that he was preparing parts of his tutorial as cheat sheets , the prevailing opinion from last year being that you can’t legitimately design a session for unknown attendees whose experience ranges from “never used Eclipse” to “stepped through source code” with the expectation that everyone would finish every step within the time allotted. Tutorials requiring that the attendees be able to leave with ready-to-run code also led us to create a plug-in project template for a simple web deployment descriptor editor, hoping that this with the cheat sheets would allow the attendees to proceed at their own pace with the two of us roaming the room for more on-on-one discussion.

The morning passed without incident, but as the presentation time approached, I still hadn’t thought of a grandiose way to open the tutorial. A humorous anecdote? A disarming question? At the least I was sure my old friend the “dramatic pause at the start” wasn’t the right way to go (it worked in college, really). I don’t remember what I ended up saying, but I don’t think it mattered in the grand scheme of things. As usual, I’m sure I spoke way too fast, but that was a constant problem for me even during my Public Speaking course back in college, some (incoherent mumbling) years ago. Except for some glitches setting up our 2.0M5 development milestone build (such as the little-known fact that WTP 2.0 effectively requires JRE 1.5 ), I think it went pretty well. I then went to a short tutorial on Java Web Application Development with WTP and had an enjoyable dinner with some other WTP Committers.

Tuesday

For me, the highlight of the day was a talk showing off Lotus Notes 8.0 (formerly known as Hannover), the first version to be built on top of Eclipse RCP. Some elements of the application remain native for backward compatibility, and they mentioned some interesting usability issues they ran into that led them to the UI that was shown. If nothing else, the prospect of being able to write full-fledged plug-ins for it opens up a world of possibilities. If Eclipse was originally built to integrate development tools, Notes 8.0 has the potential to integrate all sorts of communication and collaboration software.

The receptions afterward were an interesting mish-mash of things. For one, with a limited number of tickets for drinks, even for a soda, I followed Ben Konrath’s suggestion of trying a non-alcoholic beer.

It was mostly out of curiosity, as I don’t drink alcohol, but the flavor reminded me somewhat of BAWLS. IBM held an “Asian-themed” reception (although they seemed to ignore that India is in Asia) that included, of all things, Sumo wrestling. Sumo wrestling’s just something I’ve been wanting to try out for a while, and as the evening wore on (and after some folks I know had left), I did. Now, bearing in mind that my opponent was noticeably taller than me and that the suit made it impossible for me to bend my knees, the outcome was no surprise.

Wednesday

I attended the keynote on Wednesday morning. It was fairly entertaing with a lot of ideas and notions put forth, some of which I disagreed with, but some, such as that Open Source software tends to be the crappiest available, were surprising. In a perfect Free Market, that would tend to be true since the low cost of acquisition would drive inferior proprietary solutions out of business, leaving the remaining proprietary solutions clearly superior to the Open Source ones. My biggest problem with this notion is that it enforces the excuse of “hey, it’s free” for when something goes wrong.

Gerry Kessler and I hammered out some API details that should make things easier on folks working with custom tag libraries. Wednesday also saw the What Sucks About Eclipse panel take place. Expecting there to be nothing but venting and haterade, I skipped it but in my absence a few interesting questions were asked, including why there are so many different XML editors around from Eclipse.org. The answer is three-fold.

1. Timing. Eclipse 1.0 debuted in late 2001 while WTP’s initial source contribution was in the Summer of 2004. You had to be able to edit Ant scripts and plugin.xml files somehow before that.
2. Dependencies. WTP’s XML Editor and DTD and XML Schema models require EMF, and EMF is not part of the Eclipse SDK.
3. Feature sets. The other editors aren’t so much general-purpose XML editors as editors that understand the syntax and their own problem domain. They don’t have DTD and XML Schema support under them, nor are they aimed at being extensible to the extent that WTP’s is.

The evening ended with a mass gathering in the hotel bar with the staff struggling to keep up and the attendees overrunning the entire place. I may be developing a taste for near beer.

Thursday

As I was feeling oddly under the weather on this day, I again missed the keynote. I did make to to the Usability and User Interface Best Practices panel, though. Being extensible is a huge strength of Eclipse, but the lack of an overall UI design can easily lead to a cluttered UI when lots of unrelated plug-ins are thrown together. It’s not a simple or easy problem to solve, especially when not everyone’s even paying attention. While there are guidelines that address some issues, but it’s good to know that there are folks keeping an eye on the future.

Friday

Back to Raleigh, back to working on WTP 1.5.4 and 2.0M6. And then there’s the planning for next year…

Posted in Eclipse | 1 Comment »