Hi all...
Yes, it's been a long while (again) since I had an opportunity to write here. But after such a great EclipseCon 2010 experience, I feel it would be a disservice to not talk about it. :)
After joining Red Hat in the middle of 2009, I entered the maelstrom of tooling development in the exciting, chaotic world of Red Hat and JBoss. Leaving Sybase was tough, but it was time to do something different after nearly 13 years at New Era and Sybase. But it was a shock to the system to go from the slow and steady of Sybase to the full speed ahead of Red Hat.
That said, I've had little time to spend on DTP at Eclipse. I feel bad about this. But I'm trying to help as much as I can, just like Brian and Hemant from IBM and Linda from Actuate. None of us can spend as much time as we might like on this great project.
So I went to EclipseCon 2010 with a bit of trepidation. How would DTP be received? We really don't have much to show in our Helios release beyond a few fixes here and there.
We had one talk for DTP this year - DTP in the Real World. I spoke about our improved RCP support in DTP and provided a plea for more community involvement. And Ruth Soliani, from the Eldorado Research Institute in Brazil, who spoke about how they used DTP in their MotoDev Development Studio product (with Motorola) to connect to a SQLite database on an Android device. Pretty darn cool stuff there and they were very kind to say nice things about the DTP team. :)
On the first night of the conference, we had a DTP Birds of a Feather (BoF) that was very encouraging. We met Ray and Chris from Ingres who will be helping us out from that side of the DBMS world where they can. We met
Shenxue Zhou from Oracle, who we've been trying to help out as we can as well.
So the show of community support was awesome. At EclipseCon 2009, we had a very low attendance to DTP talks and nobody attended the BoF. This year we had 30-40 people attend the DTP talk and 3 people (beyond the DTP PMC) show up, plus one guy who was hoping DTP meant "Desktop Publishing" (Sorry about that!). We had great conversations with Ruth's team, the guys from Ingres, and Shengxoe from Oracle.
Now I'm actually hopeful DTP will survive. And that's a good thing!
A big thanks go to Oisin Hurley and Don Smith who put on a terrific conference this year. Every talk I went to had a good number of people attending and a few were standing room only (like Mik Kiersten's talk about Mylyn!). Not to mention the awesome keynotes and the giant moon robots that looked like something out of The Matrix. :)
Thanks to everyone who attended and especially the DTP community who's coming back to life!
--Fitz
And though we have a skeleton crew now helping us with bug fixes and new features, we'd love to have more folks pitch in to help - whether it's by writing articles or blog posts, reporting bugs, or offering to lend a hand with patches for existing issues or new functionality. However the help is offered, we'll probably consider it!
