EclipseCon 2010 - Some thoughts

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

DTP at EclipseCon 2009

Hey there!

Yes, it's almost that time again... EclipseCon 2009 starts with a bang on Monday. Can you believe it? It's already here!!

I head out to the (hopefully sunny) state of California on Sunday morning early for a boatload of meetings that afternoon and then DTP has a tutorial bright and early Monday morning at 8am.

But I thought I'd fill everyone in on what's cool in the world of DTP at EclipseCon this year...

We have our tutorial obviously -- "Using and Extending Eclipse Data Tools (DTP)" on Monday morning at 8am. If you're planning on attending, please check out the list of pre-requisites. We'll start with the DTP tooling, talk about DTP APIs, and then go a bit into how to extend the ODA and SQL editor for your own particular uses. Linda Chan (Actuate), Brian Payton (IBM), and myself will be presenting.

We also have a couple of long talks...

• "DTPtv and Other Wacky Ideas" (My talk merging DTP and YouTube... yeah, you read that right!)
• "Generating intelligent data access widgets" (Our friends at Ingres talking about some cool new functionality built on DTP.)
  

And a number of short talks that will be collected into one curated session hosted by yours truly...

• The curated session with all of these short talks is "Data Tools from Users to Commercial Extenders"
• Included in this set of short talks:
• "Access your data without Eclipse clutter!" (more from our friends at Ingres)
  
• "Getting started with the DTP SQL Query Builder" (Brian Payton - IBM)
  
• "IBM pureQuery: leveraging the DTP project to integrate Java and SQL development" (Brian Payton - IBM)
  

So it's not forgotten, we also have a Birds of a Feather session on Monday night. If you want to come and chat, ask questions, and see what's going on in the world of DTP please drop by!

• Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) Bof

And if you're going to attend the Eclipse Community Spotlight panel at the end of the conference, you'll get to see a bunch of us talking about what's going on in the world of Eclipse.

So be sure to check us out while you're at EclipseCon! I hope to see you there!

--Fitz

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cool DTP Talks at EclipseCon 2009 (fitzdtp.blogspot.com)
• Data Tools at EclipseCon 2009 (fitzdtp.blogspot.com)
• Podcast about DTP at EclipseCon 2009 (fitzdtp.blogspot.com)

Cool DTP Talks at EclipseCon 2009

Hey all!

I'm always amazed by the depth and breadth of talks at EclipseCon and this year is no different. In the Data Tooling category, we have a diverse set of talks (you can see the list here) on everything from some new tooling we've been working on, updates to the Graphical SQL Query Builder, how Ingres is rolling DTP components in new and unique ways, to using YouTube in DTP and how a commercial vendor (IBM) is using and extending DTP APIs for their PureQuery product.

I have to admit I'm sort of partial to the YouTube presentation I'm doing :), but I'm very curious to hear Ingres and IBM talk about their tooling and products and how DTP is playing a role in those.

For those of you just getting started with DTP, we have a tutorial scheduled for the Monday of the conference that's going to walk through a ton of topics from adding a new JDBC driver to the mix, to supporting a new database, and customizing SQL syntax and so on...

DTP is much more than just a great set of tools for data access... It's a great community. And EclipseCon is when that community comes together.

Come join our community!

--Fitz

Related articles by Zemanta

• Smoothly Blending Java and SQL with pureQuery
• New Open Source Database Offerings from Ingres and Sun
• Data Tools at EclipseCon 2009

New DB Support in DTP for Galileo...

Image via WikipediaHey All!

Yes, it's been a while. But things are starting to hop with DTP for Galileo.

Our DTP 1.7 release will include some support for new databases and some updated support for existing ones...

• Ingres has been kind enough to contribute their plug-ins for Ingres DB support in DTP for Galileo and we finally have them as part of our regular build.
• I added some rudimentary SQLite support recently and that's now part of the regular build.
• And Ivar and our friends at NexB were kind enough to contribute some big updates to our Microsoft SQL Server support, including new support for SQL Server 2008.

So big thanks to Ingres and NexB for making those contributions possible!

More changes are going in all the time as well... Enhancements and bug fixes mostly, but some new features as well.

Be sure to check out our M4 milestone build here for some early access!

--Fitz

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ingres Database Achieves Certified Integration With SAP NetWeaver Technology Platform