Anshu Jain started of the day with an excellent talk Eclipse - A Framework of Frameworks. In his talk he went through the design of a very simple calculator framework to explain all the things that Eclipse does - extensions, dynamic loading, plugin discovery etc. There was also a .cff file (calculator framework format) equivalent to plugin.xml in Eclipse. The example code from his talk is available at his site - highly recommended for someone starting of with plug-in development.
Ankur followed up with another great talk Good Practices for Plug-in Developers. Some of the images he used to drive his point home were really funny and awesome. I thought my session JDT Bootcamp (JDT Tips and Tricks, and Extending JDT) went well, of course the fact that Satyam did a fantastic job of explaining the Java Model and the Search APIs helped a great deal.
There was a lot of interest in What's new in Java 7 talk by Ayush (the guy with the funny pose in the above pic), which was nice to see. After this Praveen talked about his experience at Adobe with migrating a Eclipse 3.x application to Eclipse 4.x platform. It was nice to hear that Adobe wants to stay on the latest Eclipse platform and has made considerable progress in this regard.
The day ended with an interesting talk about Eclipse UOMo project. Werner Keil gave a few funny examples on what can go wrong if the proper care is not taken in consistently interpreting the units, for e.g. if one team uses inches and feet and the another team interprets the values as meters and centimeters. The image of an upside down NASA shuttle because someone messed up the measurement units will always stay in my mind :)
Lastly a big thank you to SAP Laps for hosting the event! You have been a great host for Eclipse Day India 2011 and the demo camp in Nov 2010. However I would like to see the next Eclipse event in Bangalore hosted at a different venue - just for variety :) Maybe other organizations can step forward.
I almost forgot, the 'discussion' over drinks in the evening with fellow Eclipse committers and Eclipse users was 'entertaining' ;-) Those who could not join us for drinks, please do next time.
