Open Collaboration on E4

Nearly as exciting as the schools of 200 cardinal tetras and 100 rummy nose tetras I added to my tank the other day was the meeting I just had!


At yesterday's e4 call, Boris offered to review the modeled workbench prototype he, Tom, and Eric have been working on. Getting early feedback is always valuable. We hooked up on skype, for free, and figured out how to screen share using Yugma, for free, so we could freely collaborate on software that we're going to give away for free; I wonder if that makes us freetards? I like to think of it as thrifty and generous, though I've been accused of having a distorted view of reality; but I digress.

Once we got over the technology hurdles, we called up Tom and Michael and started the show. What you're seeing here is a simple "Photo IDE" application in the navigator, where the structure of the workbench is modeled using Ecore, an instance of that model is open in the editor, which is then used to initialize the running application shown on the right.


Boris demonstrated how changes to the model are reflected in the structure of the application when it is launched. He also showed how cool it could look with some styling applied to it. The styling stuff isn't available yet, but is in the works:


He even showed how he easily integrated a view that displays the map location for the GPS coordinates of the selected photo:


Too cool hey? We had lots of interesting discussions and ideas for what to do next. It's very exciting to see this all unfold live and in person! I'm surprised more people didn't take up Boris' offer.

What's being done with e4 relates closely to some of the model-based work Michael is doing, so he took the opportunity to demo a few of the things he's working on. He's got this funky model that lets him rapidly configure how a table displays data in various fancy ways.


He complained a little bit about EMF's viral nature but I remained silent while my nanite servants actively reshape his thinking. When all his models have been integrated with the collective, he'll be convinced that it was a good viral infection.

It's cool that four people, from four different oranizations, in four different cities, on two different continents can get together to collaborate freely for free. Isn't life grand!