The event also represented a valuable chance for the embedded and mobile tools community to get together with a number of vendors and OS platforms represented.
A number of Symbian development tools are based on Eclipse including the Carbide.c++ series. More and more companies are switching their mobile developer environment to Eclipse based platforms. This has two advantages for them, it allows them greater flexibility in sourcing best in class tools from different vendors and makes it possible to develop their own tools that integrate seamlessly with commercial products. Carbide (the Eclipse based tools developed in collaboration between Symbian and Nokia) is now used within Symbian and many of Symbian's licensees and partners such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson.
This Pluginfest aimed to demonstrate in an open forum one of the advantages of using the Eclipse platform as a basis for development tools. Not only does it allow the use of a familiar IDE across multiple tool chains, it also potentially allows a much greater level of inter-operability between development tools. The recent PluginFest included participants from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Symbian.
A report on the event from the Eclipse Magazine can be found here and the results of the PluginFest can be found here and a comment from there is a blog entry from the Marketing Director of the Eclipse Foundation here.