If you read the trade magazines, you'd think it's an IDE. If you are IBM, you'd thinks it's the solution to all problems. And if you are Sun, you'd think it's a conspiracy against Sun.
He went on to introduce Eclipse Plugin development to an auditoriumful of Java developers, most of whom have used Eclipse as an IDE but only a few had actually developed Eclipse Plugins.
Coming into the meeting not knowing any details about Eclipse's Plugin architecture and the PDE, I felt Randall did an excellent job in explaining it.
He spent well over half the time creating and demonstrating some very interesting plugins. I'm afraid my short blog won't convey the atmosphere at the meeting. You really have to be there to get the most benefit out of the presentation.
The presentation PDF is here. The Eclipse workspace containing all the plugins Randall developed during the presentation is zipped here.