The 10th anniversary of Eclipse in Montreal
December 2nd, 2011 | Posted by in UncategorizedThe Eclipse developers community in Montreal celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Eclipse project last Tuesday. The event was a blast, filled with enthusiasts for the open-source platform. A series of talks were presented during the event. These were quite informative but not much about the modeling and transformation business, the modelsolv main interest.
It started with an overview of the 10 years of Eclipse with some anecdotal stories from Pascal Rapicault who worked for the Eclipse foundation a few years. The slides were delicious (available online). For example, the original eclipse DNS was held by a girls soccer team in Illinois also named Eclipse, their webpage back at the time is on slide 4, or there is this epic discussion forum reply on slide 24 when Eclipse worked on the Mac platform for the first time. There were many of these tidbits to the audience pleasure.
The next presentation by Anthony Dahanne was about Maven, Android and Eclipse. It had interesting information on how things are evolving for Eclipse as an IDE for building mobile applications. Marc Khouzam took the next slot to show the new features in the next version of Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling (for Eclipse Juno) and more specifically around the debugging options. This one was very well presented. One feature that impressed me is the ability for backward debugging. I don’t think I’ve seen that in any Java debugger environment yet (though the Java debugger allows to reset the execution to a previous frame in the stack). A pause then followed with some free beer, glass of wines but most important, the Eclipse 10th anniversary cake!
The Cake Was Not A Lie
After the delicious cake, Andrew Ross presented Orion. This project is well described with his motto: Tools on the web, for the web. It is YAOIDE (yet another online IDE) but coming from Eclipse, one should expect a level of expertise and workforce like no YAOIDEs. You can try it out yourself.
Pascal Rapicault came back for the final presentation, which was about reducing potential risks of using open-source in a company, especially a large one where control of which actual libraries are used or distributed is a very hard thing to do. The presenter had this opportunity to speak to a crowd lightly overjoyed (the alcool might have played a certain role) to plug the product he is working on called Sonatype Insight. This application will analyze dependencies to check for licenses that should raise red flags within a company. It does so in different ways and at different levels, for examples: the libraries downloaded from maven central or the one used in an Eclipse environment or in a continuous integration tool. Proper reports are sent to management on potential risks. Sonatype even have a team dedicated to double-check on libraries transitive dependencies and they regularly find that a claimed license for a library is wrong. That might comes handy for a large company that wants to invest more in automatic license reviews than lawsuits.
All in all, a great time, thanks to the organizers.
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Hello Jimmy !
Thanks for the article ! That describes well what happened !
A few precisions about the presenters :
* the speaker who presented 10 years of Eclipse and Sonatype insight is Pascal Rapicault , p2 project lead
* the speaker who presented the m2e-android talk is me,Anthony Dahanne
* the speaker who presented CDT debug is Marc Khouzam, CDT debug lead
* the speaker who presented Orion is Andrew Ross, from the Eclipse Foundation
and for the modeling part, I also hope a great talk will be given for the next Eclipse DemoCamp Montreal !
Thank you Anthony. I’ve updated the article with the presenters’ names and a link to their respective profile. I am looking forward to the next Eclipse events in Montreal, I enjoyed that one!