I’m back from the EclipseCon Europe in Ludwigsburg and it was a great conference, I met many new and old friends and had lots of fun. The conference was very well organized and as far as I heard it was the biggest EclipseCon Europe ever.

Although I didn’t visit all the sessions I wanted to attend (to many good conversations in the hallways!), I at least managed to see the keynotes. The keynote „Single Points of Failure: The Human Element of Software Engineering“ by Brian Fitzpatrick was brilliant. Very entertaining and non-technical keynote.

The second keynote, „Scaling Pinterest“ by Marty Weiner was very insightful and I was amazed and shocked how fast some startups like Pinterest grow and which problems they have to solve. I think Weiner had every NoSQL database you can think of on his slides.

When visiting the conference, it was clear to everyone, that M2M was one of the most important topics this year. In fact, most people were surprised how fast the M2M ecosystem of Eclipse has grown the last two years. Many people (jokingly?) speculated when the number of M2M projects will surpass the „classic“ Eclipse projects.

I talked with many people about MQTT, Eclipse Paho and HiveMQ and it was great to see that most people didn’t know much about MQTT before and most of them got very excited about this neat little technology. I personally think the conference was a big success for Eclipse Paho, there was a workshop (Christian Götz and me) about Java Paho and Javascript Paho, there was a regular Session about Paho and many people were also talking about it on the hallways.

Also, the other M2M projects on Eclipse were parts of many discussions on the hallways. I personally think there is some confusion about the focus of all these projects, but luckily Benjamin Cabé did a session about all these M2M projects and hopefully cleared the confusion for some people.

Although there are many people aware of the M2M projects in the Eclipse universe and these projects gained attention and traction recently, I think we have a long way to go until the M2M projects of Eclipse get „mainstream enough“ to be an integral part of every (Java) developers toolbox. But if Eclipse continues to follow the path they chose with M2M, I’m confident there is an even brighter future for the M2M projects and Eclipse as Foundation in General.

The slides for my sessions are available here:

Bringing M2M to the web with Paho – Connecting Java devices and online Dashboards with MQTT
M2M for Java developers – MQTT with Eclipse Paho