I’m back in the valley and gave a talk on Eclipse for Embedded at the Embedded Systems Conference. Unfortunately it was at 8:30 in the morning today (Friday) when the exhibition, where all the fun happens, is all over. But I had around 40 people there which was good to see. I also did a shop talk session yesterday at 7:15 which had close to the same number. It was good to see that they made the effort to be there, and it was good to see that almost all of them use the CDT in their daily work.

I did a walk of the show floor on Wednesday to check out the Eclipse displays. They’re still pretty hard to find at least displayed prominently. But all the regulars that I know about at least had Eclipse up on their monitors. I also ran into a new one, ThreadX which has just released a CDT based product. It really does leave Green Hills as the last hold out in the RTOS/embedded tooling community.

The other cool thing that came up is the need for p2 to be a general installer technology. I’m looking at it for Wind River product and I ran into a couple of other vendors who want to do the same. That really confirms that we should be able to build momentum to make this happen. As someone said today on the equinox-dev list, we’ve always needed an installer for Eclipse. And we’ve always needed that installer to install everything in our development environment and p2 has that capability.

I wasn’t sure I was going to come back next year, but given the number of people I talked to I’m glad I came this year. And given the interest in Eclipse in the embedded developer community, I know they need more classes at this conference to help get them going. We’ve always struggled to get an Eclipse presence here and it was good to see confirmation that we need to be here.