Last week I attended EclipseCon 2012 in Reston, Virginia, to present the EDT project as part of the Eclipse Hot New Product Showcase. While the EDT project did not win the award for Hot New Product, I did get a chance to talk to a lot of people about EDT, EGL, EDT Web Developer Tools, and Eclipse. If you have not had a chance to attend an EclipseCon, I would highly recommend making the trip.
To prepare for my trip to EclipseCon, I worked with the team to create a handout that provides an overview of the EDT project. We felt that it was important for the handout to highlight two specific areas of the project; 1) an overview of EGL as a language and the goal of the EDT project to provide an extensible IDE for EGL, and 2) an overview of our first extension, which we have been calling EDT Web Developer Tools. It was not easy to try and condense all of the information related to these topics onto two pages, but in the end I think we managed to make everything fit.
In addition to providing the best information in the limited space available, we also felt that the handout should use the same graphical theme as the EDT project web site. We enlisted Rebecca, a graphics designer at ClearBlade, who helped us get the handout just right. Thanks, Rebecca!
If you get a chance to look at the EDT Overview handout, let us know what you think! Is there anything that you would add or remove? There's a lot of content in EDT now and lots of ideas for the future, so we hope to get people as excited about it as we are.
I enjoyed the sessions and talking to people EclipseCon. Thanks to the folks who stopped by the EDT table to hear what the EDT project is all about. As always, we would love to hear what you think about the project, so feel free to post a comment to this blog, or on the EDT Forum.
-Brian
Regarding the handout:
ReplyDelete1. What is meant by "Convert existing code to various target languages using EGL as an intermediate representation"? I read "convert" as a permanent operation versus the generation that one expect when writing EGL and generating a target language. Are you really talking about conversion and, if so, what's the thinking there?
2. When will we see (or HOW can we see) ExtJS and mobile device capabilities in EGL?
3. Any examples of EGL with MapReduce frameworks? (This isn't portrayed as prototype or future functionality.)
An opinion: I cringed a bit when I saw IBM i specifically mentioned (and mentioned first) under Enterprise Integration. To me, at an EclipseCon, this is probably only going to cause most non-IBM developers to do an eye roll as they walk away. For that audience I think it would be better to emphasize database access first and then something like ESB compatibility or some other SOA-related construct. IBM i seems like too much of an IBM-specific niche for the EclipseCon crowd.
What did win "Hot New Product"? I can't seem to find out with my Googling...
ReplyDeleteHi Dan, LiveRebel, http://zeroturnaround.com/liverebel/, won the New Product Showcase, which features a variety of new Eclipse-based products (open source or commercial). Though, we're pretty confident that EDT was one of the top contributions in terms of lines of code.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be better to emphasize database access first and then something like ESB compatibility or some other SOA-related construct.
ReplyDeleteSEO