It’s been many years since I’ve been to EclipseCon Europe. It hasn’t been from a lack of desire. There’s just been a few personal and business reasons that made it difficult. But this year, the road is clear and my talk, “Arduino, Qt, and Iot with the Eclipse C++ IDE” has been accepted as one of the early bird selections. I was really proud of that and can’t wait to get there.

This last year or so has been a very active one for me and the team here at QNX with our contributions to Eclipse. The Launch Bar, which proved popular with BlackBerry 10 developers, has been made more general and is now hosted at Eclipse for all projects to use. It greatly simplifies the launch and build experience, especially when dealing with remote machines.

We are actively working on support in CDT for Qt, which has proven popular with QNX customers and other embedded systems developers. The highlight is the addition of a QML editor which we will continue to add content assist and other features expected of good Eclipse editors. While these things are good for QNX users, we think these things will be good for all users of Eclipse and also support Qt on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

I have switched my personal focus on embedded real-time systems and working on making Eclipse and the CDT much easier for developers making software for those systems. My Arduino C++ IDE bridges the gap between professional embedded developers and the hobbyist working with Arduino boards. It’s a great exercise in providing a user experience that can satisfy both and I think we’re making strides there.

My talk will attempt to cover all of that. It’s a tall order, but I have a simple, yet somewhat contrived example that shows an Arduino board with sensors and lights talking to a BeagleBone board running QNX with a touchscreen showing status from the board. The BeagleBone then communicates with a MQTT server which is watched by a vertx.x Web server to show the same information on web page. All of that is built with Eclipse and the massive ecosystem we’ve built over the years. It’s a great showcase.

It should be a great time. It’ll be good to see a lot of my European friends I haven’t seen for years or have only met on mailing lists or who I’ve never met but have an interest in the CDT and other Eclipse IDE projects. We have a CDT summit planned for the Monday and I hope to see everyone there and share what we’re planning and to see what you’re interested in.

It will be a great week. And now I really can’t wait!