EclipseCon 2007: Day 2

Now, the second day of EclipseCon 2007 is over. Much lessons heard and much foot eat. Was really a great day that ended in enlightened mind and hurting feet. In the morning I wanted to attend the Equinox session but the room was so crowded that I couldn’t even get some space standing. Seems like a lot of folks is interested in using Eclipse technology on the server side. Never mind. So I went to a BIRT talk next door which probably a good idea. Jason introduced new features of the Reporting Framework in a very refreshing and easily understandable way. I looked into BIRT in early 2005, back then I decided not to use it for our Net-Herald RCP application. But with the new features that where introduced during the course of the last year or so it makes a very competitive option to JFreeReport which I use now. Especially the Report Designer is very powerful. Using the BIRT approach we now have a chance to give our users the chance to create or change reports themselfs (with some training). It will sure take some time until BIRT makes it into Net-Herald since it’s no #1 priority but it’s an item on my list of future items. After that there was a Mylar session. For those you don’t know: Mylar adds task focused programming toEclipse. It fades out things you’re not interested at the moment and help you concentrate on the tasks at hand. It integrates with CVS, SVN, Bugzilla, Jira or Trac (others to come) to help link your code to bugs in the database. After lunch we had a talk about the Eclipse Data Binding Framework. I wrote about this yesterday. The Framework bascially helps you to wire your model against the user interface or any other part of your application. It then synchronizes the wired parts whenever data in the other part changes. It also supports validators to be hooked up in the middle. One could probably compare it with for instances the JGoodies binding framework although it is said to be more flexible (and harder to learn).

The exhibitor’s reception where the delicious part of the day. Indian and mexican food, green stuff, a chocolate fountain and a lot of coffee, bear and wine. Yammi.