A little late but its been a busy week. On Tuesday we had the Eclipse Runtime Technology Summit in San Francisco. It was a great success with about 20 people from a wide range of companies and interest groups. The discussions were lively, varied and interesting. I think everyone came away with a better understanding of what is going on. I’ll summarize the event here but for full details check out the minutes, the agenda slides and report slides.
Pretty much everyone I talked to reported learning alot throughout the day. For some it was a real eye-opener to see what is already happening. The overall sentiment was that runtimes are coming regardless of what we do. People are open sourcing pieces they have for a multitude of reasons but open sourcing they are.
This led to a discussion around stacks — the idea that, for example, people would be able to get complete app servers etc. from Eclipse. An analogy was drawn with the tooling world where we have tons of tooling technology at Eclipse but only the most widely used and commodity pieces are pulled together into coherent offerings. Witness the Europa C, Java and Web downloads. The net is that yes, at some point there will be convenience downloads of runtime technology but, like in the tooling world, these are not the goal.
One of the key elements of the discussion was the focus on OSGi and Equinox. The projects at Eclipse all use/run on Equinox. For example, having EclipseLink and Swordfish come to Eclipse and adopt Equinox and OSGi is a net benefit for the Eclipse community. It promotes the component model that underlies all that we do and adds to the set of function available for building Eclipse-based solutions.
There was alot of discussion around where to go from here. For the most part the idea of creating a runtime-oriented top-level project was seen as a good thing. Such a project would be a home for existing mature runtime projects such as RAP, ECF and eRCP, and would be able to foster new projects such as Swordfish, EclipseLink and Riena. EMF, DTP, BIRT, … which have runtime elements would not be required or particularly encouraged to change their structure or move parts to such a new top-level project. Projects in this new home would enjoy better visibility to runtime consumers and benefit from a more runtime focussed PMC and project community. A draft charter was reviewed and tweaked. In the end we decided to go the next step of refining the document and presenting it to the board.
All in all the event was very interesting, educational and well worthwhile. Thanks to all who participated and helped pull it together.
