I'm still in the process of getting my act back together after EclipseCon 2009 last week in Santa Clara, California. Was a great conference as per usual, and a bit of an eye-opener for me at least as far as the excitement (or lack thereof) for DTP in the conference community.
First, let me say that I am very excited about Amazon's announcement about the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse. Eclipse in the Cloud is a very cool concept and one that I think will prove to be fertile ground for all sorts of interesting applications. The exciting part for me was hearing that the AWS Toolkit team is still looking at using DTP to help them integrate with their SimpleDB database in the Cloud in a future release of the toolkit.
Anything we at DTP can do to help with that effort would be very educational and cool for us. And as always, we'll help wherever we can. :)
Second... There were a TON of great talks at EclipseCon this year. Though E4 seemed to get most of the buzz, I think that runtime talks were running a close second. After attending a number of talks in all parts of the spectrum (business, coding, new tools, and so on), I came away with a ton of cool ideas I'd love to explore if time allowed. Things from exposing DTP as OSGi services, to using the Data Binding APIs, to using Zest to possibly help to visualize a database schema and other things. I have a loooong list of things to explore.
And third, I was bummed about the lack of interest in our DTP talks this year. We had a few people show up at the DTP tutorial on Monday, and I had a few people at my DTPtv talk, but we ended up with an empty room for our set of short talks at the end of Thursday.
Now, I know that DTP is really more of a "plumbing" project and I get that plumbing isn't sexy. But when people put time and effort into creating presentations (and in one case fly from Germany to present), it's disappointing that nobody wanted to listen.
Yes, there were probably extenuating circumstances. I know that many people left the conference early to catch flights and there were other talks that were probably much more exciting (I missed John & Max's talk in the same slot and would have liked to attended). But still...
Even with that bummer deal, I still think it was an excellent conference. Scott Rosenbaum and the program committee (of which I was a very very minor part) did a great job recruiting amazing keynotes and cool folks to come talk about their technologies. And as I said, I came away brimming with ideas for DTP.
So maybe next year will be a better year for DTP... Who knows?
I'll be writing up one or two more posts about my EclipseCon experience this year, including a post about my DTPtv talk, which (though it went short), I had a great time doing.
Thanks to everybody involved in the conference this year. Let's do it again next year!
--Fitz
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