Blog at MoellerYoung - Eclipse, Java and BPM

What happens when your laptop breaks...

Monday
Being a victim of Murphys laws, Monday morning my laptop broke. The screen was totally hosed. So here I was with no laptop at EclipseCON. Luckily we got Dell gold support so they are supposed to come and fix it the next day.

The first day I went to a lot of membership meetings. The company I work are foundation members, so I thought I should go to them. There are a lot of new strategic developer members in Eclipse, and these all talked about their reasons to join.

Tuesday
First thing that happened was that the Dell support called and said they didn't get the part today, so they couldn't come and fix the laptop today. I was about to give that guy an earful, but it really wasn't his fault that Dell is incompetent.

Tuesday I decided to go to the business presentations. The technology ones seemed to have duplicate or similar presentations later, so I might as well get some business views on Eclipse. The first talk of the day was probably also the most interesting: Forresters Carl Zetie. He claimed among other things that probably no ISV (besides Microsoft) can afford to ignore Eclipse. Another interesting thing he pointed out was the grass-root adoption of Eclipse. When they survayed development managers, Eclipse ended up with a mere 2% of the IDE market (Microsoft being 46%). But when developers were survayed, Eclipse (including WSAD and RAD) got a market share of 60+%.

EclipseCON - Day 0 - Arriving at the Hyatt

After a 6 hours plane trip from Austin, we finally arrived in San Fransisco. Planeride was ok until the last 30 minutes; it was pretty bumpy on the way down to San Fransisco international.

Hyatt is a very nice hotel. If you haven't checked in yet, get an even numbered room. Even numbered ones faces the indoor winter garden. I got one facing the highway, but it is ok. It was 7pm when we arrived at the hotel so I think I was the last person to register today (Sunday). Going to spend some time looking through the stuff right now and then goto sleep to get up for the "new members" meeting tomorrow morning.

Bea and Lombardi joins the Eclipse foundation

I'm sure everyone has heard and seen that BEA has finally have joined the Eclipse Foundation. It has been covered pretty extensivly in media like InformationWeek.

The stories also mention Lombardi Software joining, and they of course don't get the coverage as BEA does being a relative small privately held BPM company from Austin, Texas.

Lombardi's TeamWorks platform uses Eclipse different from most people however. They create tools not for Java developers and other highly technical users, but for less technical Business level users. Before you all start to yawn or get defensive about your own jobs, this kind of software is actually pretty cool stuff. It lets us developers focus much more on the more important things in life. But there are a lot of pretenders and vapor-ware in the BPM space, so be careful.

One of the new things Lombardi is exposing in Eclipse is their Coach Designer for Business Developers. It has a unique design letting business developers and business analysts create working "process forms" (or coaces). They can create multiple forms that are orchestrated in a business process without needing to know any java or html. So business or UI designers define the form, then developers and graphical designer can extend it. It has of course full round trip capabilities between business and development (in fact there is no need for "round trip"; they both work on different views of the same model). Of course a lot of companies will claim their systems do "round trip", but few actually works.

Here are some screenshots of the designer: First design, then the instant preview and lastly the runtime form played back without any deploying or coding of any kind.

Anyways, in a few days I'll be at my first EclipseCON. It will be interesting!

Eclipse 3.1 M5 Released

Eclipse 3.1M5 is out (correction 3/20: due to some serious bug, they now made a 3.1M5a). It has a lot of new features which I'm sure will be shown off at EclipseCON next week.

Some of the new prominent features are:

* Advanced Graphics (alpha-blending, transformations)
* Event better RCP support (and also easy launching of SWT applications now)
* New inline help view
* More J2SE 5.0 support

But maybe the biggest feature for me is what is hiding behind the "CVS operations on Java packages are no longer deep". This is the first step for Logical Resource Support in Eclipse. Although it still doesn't, in my oppinion, support "real" logical reasources, this is a very important step in the right direction. For more information and discussion about logical resources, look at Bug 37723.

First test entry

Nothing special, just a test