Monday, April 19, 2010

On Noteworthy Pairs...

Phew. I've finally caught up after the frenzied activity of the past few weeks and posted a New and Noteworthy entry for the M6 milestone of EMF. If you attended the EMF tutorial or RAP BoF at EclipseCon, or perhaps saw Ben's blog post (gotta love the title of that one!), you're probably already aware of a great new enhancement that was added to EMF, thanks to generous sponsorship from another one of my clients.


That's right, EMF now supports Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) out of the box. This means that you can now generate a sample "single-sourced" application that can be run against either an RCP (Rich Client Platform) or a RAP runtime target. Details can be found on the New and Noteworthy page for the Helios release of EMF. Thanks again to Ed and Ben for their help in making this happen in time for M6!

Thursday, April 15, 2010

On Architecture...

As you may have already gathered from Kim's blog (yes, we're both from the same province and home town, and no, the tidal bore is not a pig), I've recently been appointed to the Eclipse Architecture Council. It's an honor to be in the company of such great technical leaders, especially my Cloudsmith colleagues, two of whom (Thomas and Ed) are on the council as well.

I've actually been spending a lot of time looking at architecture (or lack thereof) of late, primarily within the Modeling project. As I've mentioned before, vision is one of the key contributors to a successful project, and a guiding architecture is an important part of such a vision. With the number of Modeling projects growing at an alarming rate (60+ and counting), it's going to be increasingly important to "bring order to the chaos", or risk the loss of potential consumers and contributors due to frustration, confusion, or both. Initiatives like Amalgam and the recently proposed Sphinx project certainly help, but there's a lot more that could be done.

Speaking of Sphinx, Stephan Eberle (one the proposed project leads) and I presented a talk at EclipseCon entitled "The Twenty Modeling Things", the slides for which can be viewed at Slideshare or via the EclipseCon session page. The basic idea of the presentation was to propose set of essential services that might one day form the basis for an integrated modeling workbench at Eclipse. Which "things" would you have included? Can you think of other services which ought to be on our list?

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

On Looking Up...

It's been a while since I last blogged, and much has happened in the meantime, including the completion of contracts with two different clients (more about those later), the M6 milestone of the Helios release, EclipseCon 2010, a vacation in the Dominican Republic, and, most recently, a case of Scarlet Fever (what a way to put a damper on a vacation!). It's funny, though, how much clearer you can see when your head is in the clouds.

As I've stated previously, I've been taking my time to carefully decide what my next venture would be. Well, I'm happy to say that, as of this week, I'm now working on a full-time basis with Cloudsmith Inc., as lead of product development. If you were at EclipseCon, you'll no doubt have heard of some of the great things Cloudsmith is doing. In case you haven't, you definitely will over the coming weeks.