EclipseCon 2011 – What I Saw

Spending the week at EclipseCon 2011 in Santa Clara, and I figured this would be a good place to capture what I am hearing about Jazz in the Eclipse Community.

Monday March 21

First day of the conference and I am arriving late, in the afternoon, after the Sunday pre-conference meetings and the Monday keynote.  I did make it to a general session on Eclipse direction, which highlighted some of the new Eclipse projects.  The most interesting one to me was the Orion project, which is a project to develop a browser based IDE.  It looks pretty cool, I need to see some of the other sessions on it.  I met up with Jim Ruehlin, a fellow Jumpstart guy, and we discussed some of the things that we saw during the day.

Tuesday March 22

Spent the day showing conference attendees Jazz technologies, and discussing the various ways that the technology makes software development more seamless.  had a great conversation over lunch about how Agile and Cloud technologies are changing the way that we think of delivering value to customers with software.  The extreme example that I was presented with was the question, “Imagine that you deliver your product to a Cloud instance (whether that is development tools, email clients, office applications, etc.), and that you deliver new code every day.  Each day you have more changes and updates in the pipeline, that have undergone a full testing cycle, that get deployed.  What would stop you from doing this?  There are companies out there that are starting to approach this.  Couldn’t you do this with development tools, and just charge based on metered/subscription usage?”  It was a thought provoking question, and it makes a lot of sense.  it would completely change the current business model that many (but not all) software development tools vendors follow.  The big issues that we saw were risk (it is new and relatively unproven), security (is my code going to end up on WikiLeaks?), and trust (if you are updating things daily, or weekly, how can I be sure that you won’t impact me at the worst time).  It was an interesting conversation, and it went well past the end of the lunch break.

One of the IBM guys (Jeff Hanson) at the pedestals got an interesting question, and he asked me.  “If a customer is using Microsoft SQL Server as the backend database for Jazz, how many SQL Server licenses are needed?”  In my usual manner, when I don’t know something, I told him to look it up on the Jazz forums.  He didn’t find the answer there, but he did find this Microsoft licensing document, and buried in the fine print is the stipulation that, “Use of hardware and/or software that reduces the number of devices or users that directly access or use the software
(multiplexing/pooling) does not reduce the number of CALs required.”  So it seems like you need enough user licenses to cover your total number of Jazz users, or use their per processor licensing, regardless of how Jazz pools connections.

Wednesday March 23

The keynote this morning (The Java Renaissance) was pretty good, with a guy from IBM (John Duimovich) and a guy from Oracle (Mark Rienhold) explaining why the two companies were going to team up and support the open JDK.  It was an interesting presentation, although nobody was here from Apple (which joined soon after IBM last year).  Hmmmmmm.  It seems like there are some very solid plans to continue to expand Java’s capabilities.

I spent most of the remainder of the day setting up for my workshop (Making Rational Team Concert Do Anything – The RTC Extensions Workshop).  Just noticed that Jim Ruehlin has his mug splashed on the conference page, and gets top billing!!  That’s OK, he’s a good all around guy, a good technical guy, and I do like to read his blog, called JazzPractices.  He also did a talk on how to do Android development in Jazz entitled, Droid meets Rational Team Concert: Collaborative Development for Android Teams.

The Making Rational Team Concert Do Anything – The RTC Extensions Workshop went OK, the people who attended seemed to get a lot out of it.  i would have loved t have had better attendance, but our students provided me with some valuable feedback which I hope to get incorporated into the workshop before we put it up on Jazz.net.

Thursday March 24

The morning talk on Hadoop was pretty good.  I learned quite a bit about Hadoop, and if I have some time in the future I might look into it a bit more deeply.  Check it out yourself at the Cloudera website.

Navigating OSLC Resources

It’s been a while since I posted anything on the blog, but something happened to me today that I felt compelled to share with the Jazz community.  I was out looking at some industry RSS feeds, when I saw a blog posting for the Google APIs Explorer.  I went and checked it out, and it looked like something that could be really useful for someone working in that domain.  I liked it so much that I pointed it out to a friend of mine (Scott Rich), and wondered if we had ever thought of doing something similar for the Jazz based APIs, or for OSLC.  Scott is a lot smarter than I am, so I figured that either my whining would spur some people to action, or Scott would tell me to quit being a dope.  It pays to hang out with people smarter than you.  After you get over the feelings of inadequacy, you can actually learn a lot.

Scott sent me something back a couple of days later that was great.  He mentioned the Tabulator, pulled together by Tim Berners-Lee.  The paper looked great, I had to read it a couple of times, so now I had to see it for myself.  It looked pretty good, so I figured I would share how to get a hold of this for yourself.

I just went out and searched for it, and I found what I was looking for.  To get the Tabulator, just go to the main Tabulator page, and hit the install extensions button.  Now this interesting little capability will be added to your web browser.  You’ll need to restart Firefox to get this to work, so you’ll just have to bookmark my blog so you can get back to these instructions.

So now you have gotten back to my blog, unless you were smart and printed this whole thing out before restarting Firefox.  Now I decided to check this out, by starting up a simple local Jazz RTC instance on my laptop.  Once my RTC instance started up, I used my Firefox browser to log into my RTC instance, at https://clmwb.dtoczala.laptop:9443/jts.  Once I logged on, I then went out and decided to take a peek at what I could see on the RTC server (which is located at https://clmwb.dtoczala.laptop:9443/jts/rootservices, since I am running RTC 3.0).

Now I can see a list of all of the RDF resources that are available to me.  If you click on the little gear, you can see a bunch of small icons.  Most of these are red, but one of them is green.  Click on the green one (http://open-services.net/ns/core), and you can now see the services and resources available.

This is a nice little tool to have in your toolkit if you are working with OSLC, and this coupled with the use of the REST client that you use (check out the OSLC Workshop), and it can help you more effectively leverage your Jazz tools and infrastructure.