Fall Musings

The EclipseCon submissions are picking up their pace though no doubt there are quite a few people waiting until the last minutes to sneak in their submissions. Speaking of sneaking, look who was sneaking around my pond this lovely sunny fall morning.


I took these pictures out of my bedroom window. There were actually two of them, but I didn't get them both on camera.


Darin mentioned that foxes might help take care of my diversity problem, i.e., the mink that was eating all my frogs. Ironically, that problem took care of itself: she electrocuted herself under that rock shortly after last week's photo was taken. I wonder if there is anyone else I could convince to crawl under that rock, but clearly I digress...

With regard to EclipseCon, I highly encourage folks to think about giving short talks. I know you don't get free attendance for those, but they are very little work to prepare, they will given you a chance to talk about the cool things you are doing, and of course, most importantly, they will give everyone else a chance to find out more about you and your cool work. This is likely to help you establish contacts with like minded folks and meeting people is half the fun at EclipseCon. There are a great many short talk slots and not so many submissions for them, so the opportunity is ripe and I highly recommend folks planning to attend give a little more thought not just to attending but also to participating. Don't be shy. Help make this the most diverse conference ever. Show us your colors.


I'm looking forward to the runtime summit too. Like the Eclipse platform, EMF is well recognized as a basis for implementing tools, but it's not so well recognized as providing a very flexible and powerful runtime. EMF's core runtime even works stand alone with no dependencies on any other Eclipse runtime jars and the 2.2 runtime works with Foundation 1.1, so it can even be used on small devices. I think it's important that Eclipse's technologies be recognized as a powerful basis for runtimes as well as for tools, and this summit can help with that. It's one of the fallacies of our industry that there are tools and there are runtimes, and never the twain shall meet. Think of how much more productive developers could be if they can use common technology as the basis of both.

I'm also excited because Tom, Boris, and I are investigating supporting the core EMF runtime and the EMF edit framework that works with GWT. Tom is making very good progress. He's one of my favorite people at Eclipse because he's so incredibly helpful. I think he sets a really high bar as one of Eclipse's outstanding citizens. Check out his offer to help provide and maintain a 3.3 language pack. He's like a ray of sunshine on a frosty morning.


I've also been keeping in eye on the DTP newsgroup. I'm actually I'm a closet newsgroup junkie. Oops, I guess it's best to not say that out loud. In any case, I watched with interest the thread by Jeff Ramsdale about his offer to develop an EMF Open Data Access component. I think this will help feed EMF data into BIRT, so I'll bet a great many people will derive value from that.

Closer to home, the new Mint component is being provisioned now and there is yet another new proposal for a Temporality component. I'm very pleased that the modeling community is growing so incredibly fast. It seems to me that diversity breeds more diversity as I watch more and more people wanting to get involved in the rapidly growing set of components. I also had a few private conversations with companies looking to join the party, so I expect the pace of growth the pick up further. Eclipse is a great place to be!