Who’s On Phirst

 Last week I attended the EclipseCon 2008 conference in Santa Clara, CA.  This was my third EclipseCon and by far my best experience.  This year there were a lot more technical sessions to choose from and overall the presentations seemed more professional than in the previous years.  I also liked that the Monday tutorials were included in the overall conference registration fee, rather than an extra charge.

I think the highlight of the conference was the key note speech of Dan Lyon (Fake Steve Jobs).   Here's a quote about Dan from the EclipseCon website.

"At his blog, fakesteve.blogspot.com, Lyons has captured the Zeitgeist, from perhaps the one place it is clearest-the point of view of Steve Jobs. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift and The Onion, he uses a pitch-perfect satirical style to deliver trenchant social commentary, reflecting on everything from the Cult of Steve and the rise of Apple ("Dude, I invented the friggin' iPhone. Perhaps you've heard of it!") to the ubiquitous influence of the tech industry on our everyday lives."

Another key note speaker was Sam Ramji, Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft.   I think of Microsoft as the Borg and their presence at EclipseCon as another strategy to assimilate the Eclipse Community and open source.

The sessions that I found most interesting were those discussing the Rich AJAX Platform (RAP), The Rich Client Platform (RCP), and the Web Tools Platform (WTP).  I particularly enjoyed the "GWT vs RAP" presentation by Mark Russell and Dan Rubel, discussing the differences between Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform (RAP) development.

If you are a software developer I would highly recommend you check out next year's EclipseCon.