Well ESE is over for another year. I found this one much better for me than the last. This is a real tribute to the growing strength of the CDT community in Europe and the effort people made to come here and introduce themselves. I had a lot of fun with them and my peers in the Eclipse community. It really reminds me why we make this effort to contribute where we can.

Here are a few more points I took home from the week:

  • There were a lot more people from the embedded space at ESE this year than last. So many of the vendors in this space see the value the CDT has provided them. Hopefully this will also lead to continued growth in our contributions 🙂
  • The guys from BMW CarIT gave a great presentation on how they are using the CDT in their tool chains. They have a really cool target system comprising of 70 processors working together and are trying to get them all to do more work. It’s a great real life example of using the CDT for complex embedded systems. Hopefully they’ll post their slides to the ESE pages soon.
  • The BMW guys also let out a secret that I’m glad got out. Building an integration to a compiler with the CDT for managed build is really easy. A day’s work tops. I wouldn’t mind seeing a concerted effort to co-ordinate these, maybe make a public repository of them. That’ll also push some CDT vendors to add more to their products than just a managed build plug-in.
  • The BMW guys and others I talked to also showed me that there really are end users of the CDT that also write plug-ins to do the specialized tasks that they do. One of them even said this was getting to be a problem since there are getting to be a lot of them and is getting hard to manage version line ups. This is one of the great promises of Eclipse and part of what is supposed to make our Eclipse-based products so good. I’m excited to finally see it really happen.
  • Being without wireless LAN for almost all of the conference was really inconvenient and left me to writing blog entries late at night. But it did help me pay attention more to the speakers, which I guess is really a good thing. But lets hope it doesn’t happen again :).

Well I should get to bed so that I can get to the airport at a good time tomorrow. Thanks to everyone I met here at Ludwigsburg for making me feel welcome and I hope to see you all at another Eclipse event soon.