Yesterday Hendrik from Sigasi and I organised the first regional Eclipse community meeting in Belgium. We had people from industry (Sigasi, Inventive Designers and Collibra) and academia (VUB students and a researcher from STARLab). Considering the very short notice on which we organised this and the "just-getting-to-know-each-other" intent of the meeting, this is quite reasonable.We demonstrated our usage of Eclipse, and it is impressive to see how slick you can make your Eclipse product look. You get lots of stuff for free, but of course, we all had our complaints about lacking documentation and unresolved bug fixes. Nevertheless, in general the benefits far outweigh the negative experiences.
Dieter from Inventive Designers demonstrated Scriptura, an application for document flow control and reporting. They have been working with Eclipse since version 3.0 and have built up extensive experience after all those years. We really look forward to learning more from these guys, as they had to learn about some sharp edges in Eclipse the hard way.Hendrik showed the Sigasi Hardware Development Tool that basically finally provides a real IDE for the VHDL language. Support for code completion, syntax highlighting, refactoring, etc. These are things we as software engineers take for granted, but are not so common for hardware developers. Eclipse really shines in reuse when you're extending the IDE.
We of course demonstrated our Collibra Studio that is still hard in development. We received many ideas from the discussions afterwards on how to improve our tools. This really makes this kind of community event very useful. Seeing how others solved problems can work very inspirational. It is tempting to lose focus with all these low hanging fruits :)
It is really hard to imagine that there was still no organisation of the eclipse community in Belgium. We now took the first steps in what will hopefully become a large community. Though I am confident that this will become a success. The enthusiasm of the participants and the support from the Eclipse foundation make that a sure bet.
I was actually quite surprised by how helpful the foundation is. Ralph Mueller from the foundation was very supportive and I'd be thrilled to invite him for one of our next events. We will make sure that there is enough time to announce this properly then.
If you would be interested to join the community, feel free to contact me. You could also take a look at the wiki set up on the Eclipse site.
