EclipseCon, Day 2: Meeting with MySQL

Had a really great meeting with Jay Pipes from MySQL. Looks like this is the beginning of a strong and productive collaboration between the MySQL and Eclipse DTP communities, and I'm really pleased about it! In DTP we've been watching the MySQL community, especially some of the recent tools, with great interest, and are looking forward to seeing how we can join forces to make DTP stronger and drop-dead easy to use with MySQL.

Stay tuned... I'm sure this is going to be very interesting!

EclipseCon, Day 2: Fun with demos.

So, here I am in front of 50 or so people doing my "Data Tools for Rich Clients" presentation at EclipseCon. The sample app is pretty cool -- I think -- and it was just working (no, seriously, I swear it was just working!) in my hotel room 15 minutes before the presentation. It is an RCP application that reads the song list from an IPod....

Open the app, create the connection profile, click connect and... stack trace!
So, my first thought is "Fine, this is about building RCP apps with DTP, so I'll debug and fix this live, and it will be a good lesson." Then I looked at the stack trace, and realized that I didn't have a clue what had gone wrong. So, I did the natural thing: I tried it several times more, just to be sure that is was, in fact, really, truly broken...

Then someone from the audience asks if I have an internet connection, and it hit me: the SAX parser was trying to resolve off the box. Connected to the internet, and, finally, it worked! I don't know who gave me that suggestion, but -- seriously -- thanks!

Day 1, EclipseCon

Day 1, EclipseCon. Sold out again, they say. It amazing how this conference just gets bigger and bigger each year.

Helped out on the DTP tutorial session this morning, and it was great. A small audience, but really engaged and a lot of great discussions and questions.

Thinking about Open Source

I've been reading a lot of books/articles/research papers about open source recently, and (perhaps naturally) one frequent question is why developers participate in open source. The question is typically posed something like "What motivates developers to contribute time and code to open source?" or "Why do they give away their work for free?" Within the scope of such studies, a variety of motives and incentives is kept in the foreground.

But then, perhaps as a simplifying assumption, variation in motives and incentives is ignored when studying projects themselves, especially large (sets of) projects like Eclipse.org, Apache, or Linux. Let's ask the question: Why do companies contribute to Eclipse.org? And let's deal with the facts of variation and change of motivation and incentives over time. I think that would be very interesting to look at...

Camping out with Eclipse

On Tuesday I helped staff the Raleigh, NC Eclipse Code Camp. It was an interesting chance to meet a wide variety of people who are using, or interested in using, Eclipse.

A few years ago when I went to these sorts of events, the type of people you'd meet and the questions they'd have were very predictable. What struck me most about this Code Camp is how much this is not true anymore. With the growth of the Eclipse ecosystem and widespread adoption, Eclipse is appearing in unexpected places.

Can't wait for EclipseCon this year -- it should be really interesting to see the diversity in this larger group...