Eclipse Summit Europe

I just got back from Eclipse Summit Europe. It was my first time at this conference. It is quite different from EclipseCon, most notably because of the smaller size. There were just over 400 attendees this year.

Some highlights for me:

• Patrick and I spent 12 hours on Monday working in the Sud Haus (which he refers to as the "Suds Haus.") Pair programming is quite invigorating.
• I got to see lots of folks from OTI, whom Dave Thomas refers to as "The Eclipse Mafia." Mike, Bjorn, Ralph, Susan, Jeff, Dave and others. I also got to meet a number of people that I'd heard of but had never had the chance to meet or had not seen in a long time: Chris Aniszczyk, Heiko Seeberger, Hendrick Hoefer, Scott Lewis and others.
  
• The Runtime Symposium on Tuesday was interesting. It's an informal setting intended to spark conversation. It was interesting to hear others who are biased toward OSGi services like me.
  
• Dave Thomas' keynote the first day. Java is the new Cobol, etc. Provocative as always.
• Jeff McAffer and I gave a talk on Best Practices for Equinox and OSGi, based our upcoming book (more on that in another post).
• This year's hackathon was based on Toast, the OSGi reference implementation from the book.
  
• Andechser.

Because my wife had to leave for a conference in San Antonio by Thursday evening, I had to be home by Thursday afternoon. We had time for dinner with the boys before I drove her back to the airport. So I had to miss the final day. But it was definitely worth going.

You can see a few photos I took over on my personal website here.