On Monday, EclipseCon returns to the San Francisco Bay Area after a long hiatus in Virginia. The conference tutorials begin Monday, but we caught up with Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich to discuss his plans for the show, and to get a preview of his keynote address.

This year’s big themes for the show are the Internet of Things, Java 8, and C/C++. Chief among those is Java 8, which will be released on Tuesday. To coincide with it, the Eclipse Foundation will also release plug-ins for Java 8 on Tuesday.

“To my recollection,” said Milinkovich, “this is the first time we’ve ever shipped Eclipse-based tools for a new release of Java the same day the Java release itself went out. I think that’s really great news for the team. The Eclipse Java Development Tooling team worked very hard to make that happen.”

(Related: What developers plan to do with Java 8)

Elsewhere at the show, the C Development Tool chain, or CDT for short, gets its own theme day. “I know that common perception is that Eclipse is all about Java developers,” said Milinkovich. “But the fact is CDT is extremely well regarded and used in the industry: in support of tool chains for Linux, for real-time operating systems, and increasingly for devices in the Internet of Things.”

That’s another major theme for the show, said Milinkovich: The Internet of Things is increasingly being programmed from within Eclipse. One talk at the show, for example, will detail how to build applications using CDT and the new Parallella open hardware multicore processor board. This board is similar to a Raspberry Pi, but includes 18 cores for around US$100.

Milinkovich said that his keynote at EclipseCon will focus on the next 10 years of the project. In that timeframe, he said he expects the Eclipse Orion project to become more important. Orion is the Web-based IDE tool chain created at IBM and donated to the Eclipse Foundation.

“There’s a new project coming to Eclipse,” said Milinkovich. “The proposal went up two weeks ago, and the project is called Flux. Flux integrates the Web-based tools of Orion with the desktop tools of Eclipse, which really provides developers with the ability to use the right tools to work on their code, wherever they are. They can use Orion to work on code on their tablet, or in an environment where a Web-based browser is the right way to go.”

EclipseCon runs from March 17-20 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport in Burlingame.