EclipseCon Europe was once again a great conference with lots of interesting talks and discussions. If you are interested in graphical editors, you should definitely have a look at Jan's demo of graphical editing with Java FX. It made all the existing graphical editing toolkits for Eclipse look really old. Besides that there were also some great presentations about Java 8 by Sebastian. I can't wait to finally be able to use Lambdas in Java. Another highlight was the introduction of the new Eclipse Smart Home project. If your are into home-automation, you definitely should have a look at it's predecessor openHAB. Really promising was also the Xtend & Android talk by Sven, who showed off some features of Xtendroid, an Android API build for Xtend. These were just some of the highlights, but there was so much more to see. It looks like the Eclipse ecosystem is still thriving, the only downside is that there doesn't seem to be happening much on the IDE side.
After presenting Jnario at last year's EclipseCon, I decided for this year to focus on a more general topic: how to write fast and maintainable tests for your Eclipse plugin. I am convinced that writing maintainable tests is not that hard if you follow some basic rules. In my presentation I showed some code examples that might sometime turn into a maintenance problem and demonstrated how you can avoid these situation. Check out my slides if you are interested in more details.
