Live from Eclipse Day at the Googleplex

The day finally came: Eclipse Day at the Googleplex, 2009. This event was hosted by the Google Open Source Program Office, and really, they did a great job. Seriously big thanks to Chris, Leslie, Cat and Ellen, who put together a fantastic program. Except for the forks. (Note to self: Even if Eclipse Day lunch has no forks, I must no longer try stealing forks from a Google cafeteria. You'll get caught and questioned by the cafeteria manager.)

But also I have to thank Ian Skerrett and Lynn of the Eclipse Foundation for putting so much together on their side of the event. Ian is actually sitting right next to me: we're listening to one of the final talks "Google Plugin for Eclipse: Not Just for Newbies Anymore" given by my Google colleague, Miguel Méndez. Miguel just demonstrated how the Google Plugin for Eclipse deals with launch configurations. I'm drooling.

My teammate, Terry Parker, and I gave the keynote presentation, titled "Eclipse in the Enterprise: Lessons from Google" which was a glimpse into what it takes to support all the people at Google who build applications with Eclipse:

Providing Eclipse tools to thousands of engineers at Google is a satisfying job, but it's not always easy. In the last two years Eclipse has gone from being a tool supported by enthusiasts in their spare time to one supported by a team mandated to make engineers' lives better. We will talk about the plug-ins we've written and processes we've established to provide features, enterprise deployment and support, and even share some of the pitfalls discovered along the way.

I wasn't sure how the talk would be received, but it sure seems to have gone over well. Slides are coming shortly, as is, I hope, a YouTube video.

Along those same lines, Joep Rottinghuis from eBay talked about Deploying Successful Enterprise Tools, and it was serendipitous since he managed to touch on all the facets of enterprise tool support that we omitted from our talk: support, documentation and training.

The best part, though, was how people from both eBay and Cisco told us that they were happy to see us talking about the scalability issues we've seen; they have the same problems!

All of this underscores what I have thought since last year's EclipseCon: next year I'd like to see an Enterprise Tools BoF.

Ooh, gotta go: now Miguel is talking about adding special JSNI formatting in editors. Swoon!