I went to Eclipse Banking Day in NYC today. It was an event gathering people in the industry and talk about eclipse.Years ago, I had the impression that open source staff were not mature and stable for corporate use. With the huge success of many business embracing open source, now it is normal to me to see that so many financial businesses make great success with open source communities, such as eclipse.
My favorite sessions areEclipse 4.0: The Next Generation of Eclipse, Creating Platform Using Eclipse Equinox, Profile-Direct Teller: Real-time Core Banking on Eclipse RCP, Helios - Application Integration Platform for Front Office Trading Applications, and Provisioning Eclipse in the Enterprise.
The eclipse version number hasn’t changed a lot in past 4 years. Also ver 3.x is expected to rock another a couple of years, co-existing with eclipse 4.0 like apache 1.x and 2.x. However eclipse 4.0 will be delivered in 2 years. I didn’t see too much changes to the current way I use eclipse. But surely that eclipse is possible to go web in the long run.
One of the speakers did presentation by telling a story. The story is very similiar with what I am struggling with. His slides are very interesting while lacking of details. Sometimes the details are what could stumble you for quite a while. A couple of terms in his slides are very interesting. They seems to have possibilities to ease my work. I will do further investigation.
There is a session about BIRT. The presentation is great. The speaker is great. Unfortunately I know so few about BIRT and there are so many stuff that I got lost through his demostration. The output report is very beautiful and flexible. I had a few experience with some charting tools and templated report tools. BIRT is definitely a powerful report engine.
There is an session about p2 which is new provisioning platform in eclipse. Previously I read many articles about p2. Through the presentation doesn’t give too much more information, I really like its vision. If the dreams were well fulfilled in the future, desktop software provisioning will be much more pleasant. As a comparison, more and more software provisioning is achieved by online web services. We know web services method is really as easy as breeze.
Another interesting point: A speaker said that nowadays browsers as a platform is analog to Windows 98. Several years ago before AJAX, browsers as a platform is analogy to Windows 3.1. Very interesting metaphor! It implies that web applications have much more spaces for imagination!
