I’m very happy to announce that we now have a new committer on Swordfish! Volodymyr Zhabiuk has been successfully elected last week and now has full write access to the Swordfish SVN.

Volodymyr was deeply involved in a many architectural discussions in the past and has had quite some impact on the current design.

Welcome, Volodymyr!

We’re back from two exciting days at Eclipse Summit Europe in Ludwigsburg. As always, it was great to meet so many people you rarely see and get to talk to in person.
The quality of the talks was good overall, but somewhat inferior to last year’s ESE in my opinion. These are my comments on the talks that I had a chance to attend:

• Keynote by Dave Thomas: Great content from an industry veteran, very relaxed, very provocative, but really inspiring!
• Implementing Screen Flows in Eclipse RCP Applications: Clean and easy solution to a problem often encountered when you try to use RCP for non-workbench style applications like banking, insurance etc. Would be great if it could be included into SWT.
• Deploying Eclipse Modelling On an Industrial Scale with Software Factories: Boring and, sorry, I just didn’t get the point.
• Next Generation Textual DSLs with Xtext: Great concept, well done and an excellent presentation.
• Aspect Weaving for OSGi: Not really new to me, but I’m always amazed by the possibilities this opens up. Good presentation.
• Higgins Identity Framework: Did you really expect to cram 48 slides into 25 minutes? I left after 40 minutes because lunch was getting cold.
• What’s New in Plugin Development: Great new features and, as always, very professionally presented by Chris.
• Best Practices for Equinox and OSGi: Great example application, much different and definitely more fun than the standard RCP blabla. Really looking forward to read the book!
• Eclipse on Rails: RCP at the Swiss Railway: I never thought that you could really do this type of thing with RCP. Very interesting application domain and presented with great style in the tradition of Swiss graphics design (think Helvetica))
• RT Project Demo: Too short to be really useful IMHO.
• EclipseLink: High-Performance Java Persistence: Good presentation and a great piece of software.
• Equinox p2: Provisioning your world: A bit weak on the demo side, so not everything was completely clear to me. p2 is definitely something to keep an eye on.

My own presentation “Eclipse Swordfish – an Open Source SOA Runtime Framework for the Enterprise” went smoothly with a reasonable number of auditors still there at that time of the day. Thank you very much for attending! The slides are up on the conference site.

I’m really looking forward to EclipseCon in Santa Clara next year!

The first two days of EclipseCon are over and it has been a great experience for the whole team so far. We’ve met a bunch of amazing people and the interest in SOPERA and Swordfish in particular was very encouraging. Thanks to everyone who was attending my talk on Swordfish today… I’d never thought that it would attract so many people!

Only a few hours to go and we’re off to Santa Clara, California, for EclipseCon 2008!
It’s going to be a big thing for SOPERA this year:

• On Monday, 10:30, Jerry Preissler is holding a tutorial on policy handling with Eclipse STP, together with David Bosschaert of IONA Technologies. Don’t miss it if you’re interested in advanced SOA concepts!
• SOPERA’s CTO, Ricco Deutscher, is going to talk about why Deutsche Post decided to go open source in his long talk on tuesday at 11:10. If you care about the business side of open source, this is for you!
• Yours truly is going to talk about — you guessed it — Swordfish on Tuesday right after lunch at 13:30.
• And finally it’s Jerry again: at 14:30 he is doing a talk on an integrated approach to SOA tooling for ServiceMix and other platforms. If you’re a ServiceMix user, go ahead and watch it!

Above all that, we’re a gold sponsor and have a booth in the exhibit area. So if you want a nice green backpack, just come by and talk to the friendly people in the black T-Shirts.

See you in Santa Clara!

Admittedly, things have been a bit quiet around Swordfish lately. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve been lazy: Everybody was working behind the scenes to prepare the initial code contribution.

The initial contribution is the core SOA engine from the SOPERA Advanced Services Framework, formerly known as Service Backbone from Deutsche Post. This contribution has just passed the first gate of the Eclipse Parallel IP compliance process. Once the code is committed to the Subversion repository (due to happen very shortly), we will start refactoring that “in the open”. The result will be an OSGi-based SOA engine — the first milestone on our way to an SOA runtime framework.

Just in time for Eclipse Summit Europe 2007, I’m proud to unveil our logo:

Kudos to ayjala@web.de for her great design work!

Watch out for the guys wearing Swordfish T-shirts on the Summit — that’s us.

The detailed project plan for Q3 and Q4 2007 is almost finished. I’m going to post the details next week.

The Eclipse Summit Europe is only 3 days ahead and the Swordfish team is really excited about the huge number of quality talks and symposia as well as the chance to meet interesting people from all over the Eclipse universe.

If you’d like to meet us, there’ll be quite some opportunities:

• Klaus Kiehne will participate in the Server-Side Eclipe Symposium on Tuesday.
• SOPERA’s CTO, Ricco Deutscher, will be talking on “Best Practice SOA goes Eclipse” on Wednesday at 11.00.
• Gerald Preissler and myself will present Swordfish in the Poster reception on Wednesday at 18.00

Moreover, our employer SOPERA GmbH is an official sponsor of ESE 2007, so you’ll probably find us around SOPERA’s display area. If you’d like to arrange a meeting, please feel free to give me a call on +49-160-98931313.

Looking forward to meeting you in Ludwigsburg!