Life at Eclipse

I’m heading to the airport soon, and wanted to blog about the week before leaving.

I’ve been in Bejing this week for the first annual Eclipse Day in China. This event was hosted by Tsinghua University, the premier technical university in China. (Sometimes referred to as the “MIT of China”.)

The Eclipse Day was sponsored by Actuate, HP, IBM and Sybase, all strategic members of Eclipse.

Here’s a little known fact: between Actuate and Sybase, there are around 50 Eclipse committers located in Shanghai, which I believe makes China the third largest country in terms of Eclipse committers. (US and Canada being #1 and #2 respectively.)

The Eclipse Day was a huge success. We were trying to be conservative as it was our first event in China and planned for 100 to 140 attendees. By lunchtime, 230 attendees had registered. Apparently, there are a lot of organizations using Eclipse in China. There were attendees who had used just about every one of the major Eclipse projects, and the RCP session was packed.

This is my first trip to China, and it has been a wonderful experience. Sitting beside me on the flight from Vancouver was Maurice Strong who has been coming to Bejing regularly for 40 years. He told me to expect to be surprised, and I was. I’ve never seen hyper-modern so closely juxtaposed with the ancient.

Here’s a picture of John Kellerman of IBM and I playing the tourist on the Great Wall of China.