Eclipse November DemoCamps 2010 retrospective

November is over now and last week I attended the last DemoCamp for the year. In this year’s November DemoCamp series I spoke at three events and with this post I’d like to present you with some impressions.

Bonn, November 16th: The beginning…

It was the first DemoCamp that was located in Bonn ever. So, as a result of this the audience was not very big, although at least 40 people found their way to the demos. I was already familiar with most of the talks.  I’d seen both Marcel Bruch’s talk on the Code Recommenders project and Mathias Sohn’s talk about EGit before, but they are still interesting. Besides these talks, one highlight was the talk about Xtext from Karsten Thoms which I hadn’t seen before in this form. He demonstrated how easy it is to create a DSL with Xtext. It’s fantastic what people can do with Eclipse technology.

Afterwards we all met at the Stammtisch. The bad thing was that Ralph Müller had to leave the talks early because he wasn’t feeling well. (Just a note here that he left before the RAP talk, so it wasn’t the talk that made him sick) ;)

München, November 23rd: Party time…

For me it was the first time speaking at the annual DemoCamp in Munich. The organizers are well known Eclipse folks: Jonas Helming, Maximilian Koegel and Ekke. The cool thing was that these guys were so good at publicizing the camp that 100 people decided to spend an evening watching the demos. One thing that I missed was the talk by Marcel Bruch. Marcel where were you? Despite Marcel being missing, there were some really good talks. Two examples are the e4 talk by Tom Schindl and the Mylyn talk by Benjamin Muskalla. Of course both talks have been given before but I still recommend listening to them. They’re great speakers. Of course the RAP talk was another highlight ;)

To put it all in a nutshell Munich was one of the best DemoCamps ever.  It had a very friendly atmosphere with beer service during the talks (thanks Jonas) and a great Stammtisch afterwards. But once more Ralph missed it so I had to pay for my own. ;)

Karlsruhe, December 9th: The return of Ralph…

The last DemoCamp I visited in this series was the Karlsruhe DemoCamp last week. And guess what?  Marcel Bruch was speaking there. Why was I not surprised ;)? In addition to his talk, there was a world premiere in the form of Markus Tiede from Bredex presenting Jubula, one of the most recently created Eclipse projects. It was really fun to watch the IDE program by itself. Some other good talks were given by Benjamin Muskalla and Karsten Thoms. I saw Karsten in Bonn and the good thing was, that he presented two different talks. Its really nice to see that some people invest the time to provide fresh talks to the audience. I think I need to create a new talk too ;)

The same as with the other camps, there was a Stammtisch afterwards. And surprisingly Ralph Müller was there too. So, the first round was on the Eclipse Foundation. Thanks Eclipse Foundation! I’m sure he came because he wanted to give his 6 democamps tour a nice finish. Hope to see you on more Stammtisch’s next year, Ralph.

To sum up, it was a great month with a lot of traveling. I met a lot of nice people that are all involved in Eclipse in their own way:  some as IDE users, some as contributors, some Foundation folks and a few committers - the ecosystem in its pure form. So, I hope to see some of you again at EclipseCon next year where I hope I’ll also be able to show you Eclipse RTP.