I have to say that I’ve been very impressed so far with the Eclipse Forum India conference. The people are very welcoming and kind. During Day 1 of the conference, Wassim and I gave a full day tutorial on RCP/Plug-in development which was well received. To my complete surprise when I asked my standard question of who has developed plug-ins and used Eclipse before, well over half of the room raised their hand (~150 people). The audience’s general Eclipse savvy made for a very interesting Q&A 🙂
The following day, I gave an introductory talk on eRCP that went well. Most of the people in the audience didn’t really have an embedded background, but I hope my message around reusing Eclipse skills to develop mobile applications got through.
Our beloved Mik Kersten gave a talk on Mylar and his new venture Tasktop.
On the whole, I think Eclipse has a surprisingly strong presence in India. In one of the talks, CodeGear’s chief evangelist (David Intersimone) asked a large audience how many people use Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, Emacs/VIM (hi Ed). I would say easily 80% of the audience used Eclipse and the rest of the audience was equally split between IntelliJ and Netbeans (except for that one guy in the back who used VIM).
I would like to say thank you to the conference organizers (especially Dilip, Masoud and Neeru) for a job well done and many thanks for your hospitality. I am definitely looking forward to next year’s conference! I’m now off to find an elephant for Wassim to ride, because apparently this is on his “things to be done before I die list.”