I just attended the Eclipse Summit India, at The Chancery Pavilion, Bangalore. It was good experience to be participating in this. I was eager to attend this summit as soon as it was announced. A summit in this area was being conducted for the first time in India and I was probably fortunate enough to be in the same town where this was being conducted and to have the support of my organization to encourage people into such initiatives.
Organized by a media startup “Saltmarch“, I would say it was mostly well organized, except for a few things that bothered me – multiple sessions being scheduled at the same time, some of which were so tempting that I had to juggle between sessions to be able to get a slice of what I was looking for from this summit. There was very little time to be able to visit the stalls. There were not many stalls at the summit, although I was able to find a few ones I was interested – Adobe and the Actuate.
The very first day I was surprised to see Microsoft (MS) being a Platinum sponsor for this summit. I was wondering what MS is doing here, considering that Eclipse is so very Open Source. Soon enough, I realized what MS was seeming to do. MS has now opened up to this part of the world and is providing good integration capabilities for the sake of end users / customers. Not for no reasons! The idea proposed by MS, was to help reduce the pain points of the customers / end users, by trying to remove the pain of having to work with different services that do not talk to each other thereby ending up burning their pockets. A novel thought; and good support from the organization. But I guess there is more to it. I was left thinking about the various strategies the software majors are now into. And interesting ones at that!
Adobe has come out with a very innovative and path breaking platform of Flex that gives a whole new world of possibilities to the customers/companies/developer community. Having a vast experience in the area of designing and online document/security standards, they have taken a next step, which is providing a innovative way of realizing your designs into working apps. A big leap this!
Flex is free, open to the opensource community. And boy! it can do wonders for your application. The workshop suggests seeing the Bombay Sapphire website that uses RIAs/Flex for reference.
Microsoft may have soon realized there is an opportunity in this area and quickly came up with Silverlight - a very good competition too. Now, I would imagine this is where the marketing takes place 
No, I am not belittling their initiative, I attach these reactions probably to my being surprised. In fact I was very happy to know that Microsoft is now providing such support and taking such initiatives. The provision of interoperability will prove a boon to this world. Way to go MS !
A few interesting things I picked up from the sessions…
It was also useful to find some tips on UI programming…For more, visit http://wiki.eclipse.org/UserInterfaceGuidelines
One session that I found very useful, was the session on Building Data Centric Rich Internet Applications by Sunil and Mayank. It was good to note and learn that the tools/plug-ins provide Data Centric Development (using FlashBuilder) and Design Centric Development (using Flash Catalyst). It encompasses a lot of efficient design aspects such as Lazy Loading of data. Although this feature is available only in the commercial version of the product (LCDS), you can still do a lot with the freely available one (PHD?). The Flash Catalyst simply converts flat UI to a dynamic UI by bringing the images live with interaction code! This is a great interaction designer tool…very cool
It was good to know that recently, a two way binding between the forms and fields (app and backend) was introduced in Flex. This is very useful, escpecially with all the asyncronous capabilities this tool provides. It now has the deployment helpers such as Network Monitor, Unit Testing capabilities, command line build capabilties. That’s Cool!
Take a tour…. refer tourdeflex at http://www.flex.org
Oracle showcased the OEPE (Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse). I was immediately interested in evaluating KODO – which is a tool they claim will scan the DB and give schema, and generate JPA classes as well…
Oh…before I forget, one interesting and useful feature for the developers that I picked up from the summit was the FastSwap (class redefinition) capability that Oracle now provides for WebLogic deployments. It seems to completely eliminate the need for Build and Deployment during the development phase on Eclipse.This provides a great time saving opportunity for the developer! The developer can now immediately Test the changes as soon as it is edited! Change the code and refresh browser Very cool indeed!
Also, find time to visit http://www.jazz.com , where one can see what IBM has done to provide a platform that has extensibility and collaboration of sorts to avoid silos…
Last but not least, I must say the session on Google App Engine for Java and Eclipse Developers by Janakiram MSV was very very informative, provided insight into the various concepts and background of WebSevices, SaaS(Software-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and Cloud Computing…I never knew earlier that it was Amazon which initiated Cloud computing, by putting to use all the loads of hardware they had over-procured during the dotcom boom…After the dotcom burst, they were left with about 4 times the hardware they actually needed and this is how they utilized it (when it was otherwise being considered a huge waste of investment during the times). What a path breaking idea this was!
To know more about Google App Engine visit http://appengine.google.com or http://code.google.com/appengine
I was initially bothered about the summit starting very early in the morning (I know 8 a.m. is not early for many, but for me, I had to drive 20+ kms before I reach the location). At the end of it, there is no regret. It was a good summit, two days well spent!
