Since 2008 I missed only one EclipseCon Europe, the annual Eclipse Conference held in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

This year the program committee accepted a talk from us about deep learning in general and DL4J as an Eclipse Project.

Having a talk accepted from the committee is always an honour and a pleasure, but this time it was particularly special for a couple of reasons:

  1. it was the only talk about deep learnig in the program and
  2. … well, it was scheduled in the forum theatre, where keynotes, announcements, welcome and important talks and closing sessions are held.

Therefore, when I entered the theatre for the Mike Milinkovich’s keynote, I realized once again how big is that theatre.

I was still thinking about all this when Mike welcomed on the stage the Deeplearning4j team lead, Adam Gibson, which has joined the conference as a last minute decision.

Oh my! I would have held a talk on DL4J just in front of its creator Adam Gibson!
Well, a couple of hours later I was done: here you can find the slides

Getting involved in deep learning with DL4J

and the YouTube video

As always it could have been better, but anyway: it was over and I could finally enjoy the event!

First goal: start greeting and have some chat with a number of friends that we meet regularly every year at this great conference.
And of course meet and have some talk with Adam Gibson!

Adam Gibson and me at EclipseCon Europe 2019

This conference is held every year in late october at the Schlosspark Forum in Ludwigsburg.

And every year, in this week, the talks are scheduled from Tuesday to Thursday, while on monday there are meetings among special groups and projects as a time dedicated to make a point about the progress and take decisions for the future.

Indeed Tuesday morning is a special time: several 3-hour tutorials are held on different topics and you can just participate with your laptop and to learn from the experts. During the tutorial you are helped personally in order to keep the pace while working on the examples.

I followed the one on Theia, a new cloud and desktop IDE and platform which is revolutionizing the development approach.
Theia can be used as an IDE that runs on the browser (it can run also as a traditional desktop application anyway) so to reduce to zero the setup for the developer; forget about installing tools, libraries and whatever on your machine: you just need the browser to start working on a project!

Here is the TypeFox team that is behind Theia.

But Theia can be also be used as a platform to build your own application, all with a high degree of customizability, similar to Eclipse RCP.
It has been adopted and backed by companies like Ericsson, RedHat, IBM, Google and ARM.

If you have a public project on GitHub, then you can start using Theia just by installing Gitpod Online IDE extension, go to your code and press the green GitPod button: you can edit your code inside the browser!

The conference is indeed a join of two events: the EclipseCon Europe and the OSGi Community Event. Moreover it includes a number of talks dedicated to Project Quality & Testing.

There were a lot of talks about hot topics as Java9+, IoT, containers (Docker, OpenShift, but particularly on Kubernetes).


GraalVM
seems to be very promising both for its performances as a VM and also for the fact that it can compile Java into native code.
There are rumours that it will probably replace the HotSpot JVM.

Eclipse Che is also another very interesting project: in essence it is a workspace server and an online IDE (it uses Theia for this!).
It is an Eclipse Cloud Development which includes a multi-user remote development platform that can run on a Kubernetes or an OpenShift container.

The cool thing about this event is that every talk (and they are really a lot) is now online on YouTube!!
So if you couldn’t be there (or were there, but couldn’t attend one talk because you were attending another in a parallel session), then enjoy them here:

?