JavaFX
Kai Todter and Tom Shindl prepared two separate implementations and adopted JavaFX for the RCP purposes. I was aware they were working on it, but results were astonishing. The coolest think that I saw was when Tom installed a bundle just by dropping it on the top of his application (maybe something like this could be implemented for regular Eclipse, too?). Another cool issue was native builds for the MacOS, which included Java (this is pretty important as Apple itself does not ship it). I really think that JavaFX has the potential to be the next SWT, and I'd like to see it in mainstream as soon as possible. And no, Oracle did not bribed me with a Raspberry Pi.
Orion
The Orion project seems to gather momentum. There was even an example of a real-world application called "Scripted" and done by VMware folks. If you add to this a Mozilla keynote, where Mozilla OS was presented, you cannot miss the value of Orion. It looks like the future consumer market will be totally dominated by JavaScript applications.
Maven/Tycho
Tycho is a black horse of this conference for me. Despite suffering from serious integration issues (as explained by Igor Fedorenko), it is widely adapter for build (not necessarily for development). I have not seen anyone talking about PDEBuild (except me), so the only thing I can say now is:
The King is dead. Long live the King.Face it, whether you like it or not.
Last, but not least, there will be a new EclipseCon family member. In 2013 expect:
- EclipseCon (March)
- EclipseCon France (June)
- EclipseCon Europe (October)
