AJ Tarachanowicz

Scott Adams was the Keynote Speaker to kick off EclipseCON. He started off with a story on how he became an cartoonist and the evolution of Dilbert. Then went into how to be successful and briefly talked about his past. Afterwards he showed some comics and shared a story behind each of the comics on why they didn’t quite make the cut. It was an amusing morning that started off with a ton of laughs.

Next I attended a talk on the AJAX Toolkit Framework. I’ve been meaning to check this out for quite some time but never got around to it because the Firebug plugin for Firefox did everything I needed, or so I thought. I have now come to the conclusion that I was wrong and since have installed ATF. It has all the benefites of Firebug plus so much more. If you’ve never had a chance to check out AFT I strongly encourage you to do so. It just so happens that as I finished writing this paragraph a gentleman came over to the table and set down a handful of CDs from Backbase titled “AJAX Starter Kit.” Quite ironic if you ask me. Looks like I have yet another AJAX pluging for Eclipse to give whirl.

After the AFT talk, I attended “Task-focused programming with Mylar” presented by the Project Maintainer Mik Kersten. I’ve been using Mylar for roughly the last 6 months and it has completely changed the way I work. I have never been so orginized or more productive. Mylar allows you to build a context related to the current task (bug, feature enhancement, etc) at hand and forget about everything else. Thus making it so that when you switch between tasks all the files that are related to that task are reopened, bringing you back to exactly where you left off. No more trying to remember what files, classes, or methods are related to the specific task, Mylar handles it all for you. Tasks are imported from your bug tracking software (Bugzilla, Trac, and a few others) or you can add personal task locally. Task context can also be shared between developers which is an incredible feature. You can also see incoming and outgoing changes to tasks from within Eclipse. Since ATF provides a Mozilla implementation I no longer have a reason to have Firefox open. Now that I can update tickets in Trac and view what I’m working on from within Eclipse. Mik provide a detailed look at what can be done with Mylar and what to expect in the upcoming 2.0 release. He also annouce a new partnership with Tasktop which extends Mylar bringing it’s functionality to desktop applications such as your email client, web browser, word processor and web services. Which will allow you to add context outside of Eclispe related to a task. This plugin is a must have for every programmer.

This talk was followed up with a long awaited lunch which. After I attended a talk on the Data Tools Platform Project (DTP) which was very interesting and I learned a good deal on the internal workings of the plugin. Including how to create my own dialect for a RDBMS. I wish I could of stayed for the entire talk but my presence was required at the Open Source Pavilion causing me to have to leave about a half hour early.

In the Open Source Pavilion I had the opportunity to demo PHPEclipse for roughly 6 hours. No sooner did I sit down and setup the laptop did someone show up for a demo. Just as I was in the final moments of my first demo John Ward (presented the tutorial I attended on Monday) stopped by. I was expecting him because on Monday I had mentioned to him that I would be doing demos of PHPEclipse on Tuesday. It just so happened that he was working on a PHP project and was looking for a PHP plugin with a functional debugger. All the ones he tried including PHPEclipse he couldn’t get the debugger to work properly. Being the debugger guru that I am from the past couple of years spent on IRC helping people setup PHPEclipses’ debugger. I had him well upon his way to debugging bliss after about a half hour, he couldn’t of been happier. I continued to demo PHPEclispe to several more people and finally the person I had been waiting for showed up. I knew eventually someone of the Zend would stop by and that someone did.

He admitted right off the bat that he had never looked at PHPEclipse and told me he was one of the QA people for PHP Development Tools (PDT). After which he asked if I’d be kind enough to give him a tour which I delightfully accepted. I started off with an overview of the workspace layout which he complimented on how intuitive it was. Next, I explained how the code completion and syntax highlight worked and finally I did an in depth demo of the debugger. The only thing he had to say as he left was PHPEclipse was very impressive. So far this has been the highlight of the conference for me. It’s always nice to demo a product for a competitor and them being blown away. Now I have no choice to return the favor, as I finish writing this I am on my way to the PDT talk.