2011 EclipseCon Conference Launches Today 

The fifth annual EclipseCon Conference, which starts today and runs through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif., promises to be a humdinger.

The marquee keynote at this year's event is the much anticipated David Gondek talk, "What Is Watson?" Watson, for those who don't have all the time in the world to watch TV (or read newspapers), was the system that beat two Jeopardy champs. Gondek is a research scientist on the DeepQA/Watson Project, and he promises to provide "a tour of the technologies that power Watson."

Mark Reinhold and John Duimovich's keynote, "The Java Renaissance," promises to be interesting. Reinhold is chief architect of the Java Platform group at Oracle, and Duimovich is Java CTO and distinguished engineer at IBM. Big Blue and Big O joined forces in October to make the OpenJDK project the premiere location for open source Java development from the two companies, so it's a fitting duo. I'm wondering if anyone will take offense at the notion of a Java "renaissance," which means "rebirth."

There's also an OpenJDK panel following the keynote. The panel includes Reinhold and Duimovich, plus Milinkovich and Oracle's Adam Messinger.

Cloudera software engineer Todd Lipcon is offering an intro to Apache Hadoop. Tons of interest these days in this Java-based open-source framework for data-intensive distributed computing, so I'd expect a big crowd. A committer on the project, Lipcon promises an introduction to Hadoop that covers the motivation for the system, the Hadoop ecosystem, the overall architecture, and the programming paradigms used to express scalable and flexible computation on large datasets.

This year's event is also hosting the fifth annual OSGi Devcon event. The co-located conference runs March 21 through 24 is open to all EclipseCon attendees. This is widely considered to be the premier OSGi developers' event, and features four days of talks, tutorials, and presentations for OSGi beginner and experienced OSGi developers. Look for sessions on OSGi and the cloud, software complexity, open source, massive device deployment, new tools, and nuts-and-bolts how-tos.

Of course, there will be lots of vendor announcements at the event. Here are a few to watch for:

• Compuware is showcasing its new Workbench product. Workbench is an open environment for managing mainframe app development through an Eclipse GUI. It also provides a common framework and single-launch point to initiate Compuware’s mainframe products and other mainframe and distributed products.
• Genuitec is demoing “OneInstall,” which the company bills as a one-click, cross-platform installation technology designed to allow developers to deliver their apps to end-users, and manage updates on the user desktop. This is a direct competitor with InstallAnywhere and InstallShield, and worth a look.
• AccuRev. will be announcing updated integration of its software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution with Eclipse at the show. The Eclipse Plug-in for AccuRev is designed to provide out-of-the-box integration between AccuRev and the Eclipse IDE platform.
• I also got a cryptic email from Juniper Networks about news expected at the show about its Junos SDK and Junos Space SDK. The Junos SDK is designed to enables developers to "innovate on top of Junos and Juniper Networks platforms." The Junos Space SDK is aimed at developers building and deploying network-aware applications.
• Finally, a company called itemis , an independent IT-consulting company and strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation, has created an EclipseCon 2011 app. Peter Friese, Heiko Behrens, Ekke Gentz, and Christian Campo developed the app, which runs on any phone with a Web browser. It lets you browse the schedule, mark your favorites, create your own personalized conference schedule, see photos of the presenters, and refer to maps of the venue and Santa Clara. It's downloadable from the EclipseCon Web site.

Watch this site for more coverage of the show.

Posted by John K. Waters on March 21, 2011