EclipseCon 2015

This time of year I usually find myself somewhere in the US attending EclipseCon. This year was no different. This time EclipseCon stayed put in the same location as last year, in Burlingame, CA. The venue was good (although most business hotel places tend to all look the same and a little boring, but then again I didn't come here to visit innovative hotels).

Being my 7th EclipseCon I'm almost getting the feeling of being a veteran, and it was great fun to meet friends which I usually only meet at EclipseCon. I also had the good sense of attending the hackathon on tuesday evening and got my feet wet with a real commit to CDT. Thanks to Marc Khouzam and Marc-Andre Laperle for helping me out with that.

As it so often is when you're at a conference, there are more talks than you can attend, but I'll try to summarize some trends or themes as I saw them.

The first theme I found interesting was the two seemingly unconnected talks Boosting CDT Build and Eclipse & Gradle - The best of both worlds. Both focused on the importance of maintaining build models and the possibility of being able to consume builds in different ways. By using an external process as a build server and implementing a well-defined API, builds can be made more stable and more flexible. Maybe Gradle has the potential to solve the CDT MBS mess as well.

The second theme is cloud development which had its own track. Eclipse Che, Eclipse Orion, and Eclipse Flux are just a couple of examples of using your browser as an IDE. But this trend is not only about IDE-in-a-browser, but also about extending the Eclipse ecosystem to include more than just the Eclipse Platform. This has been going on for some time, but it became very clear to me at this conference.

The third theme I'd like to mention is UI testing. Jubula has been around for a while, but this was the first time I had the possibility to attending a talk about it. Another similar tool is RCPTT which addresses much the same issues, but has some different takes on it. I've tried several ways at doing automated UI testing, but it always boils down the the problem of identifying UI elements in a way that allows you to capture UI logic such that it is possible to write useful, stable, and maintainable tests.

There were many more talks and things to mention about EclipseCon, but I will leave it at that.

Other links about EclipseCon 2015 (let me know if I should add more links to this list):

• Doug Schaefer's blog
• Paul Krill on Mark Reinhold's Java 9 keynote
• Youtube videos (speaker pitches among other things)
• John K. Waters wrap-up