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EclipseCon 2008: Eclipse Communications Framework (ECF)
Dev2Dev Editor's Blog |
March 21, 2008 2:42 PM
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Thursday afternoon I attended an interesting EclipseCon session on the Eclipse Communications Framework (ECF).
Scott Lewis from BEA and Markus Kuppe from Versant led the session and Ted Kubaska participated remotely from Portland to help demo the framework.
Scott began the session by introducing the need for the Eclipse Communications Framework. He argued that teams, especially open source teams but even teams within many large organizations, are changing in a number of ways:
- Team membership is distributed - there is often a need to work with others over long distances and multiple time zones.
- Teams are often cross-organizational and multi-organizational
- Team members have more diverse skills, backgrounds and cultures
- Project organization is becoming flatter, there are more volunteers and members have more control (ECF itself is an example of this - it is a voluntary project not supported by any one company)
The expectations of your community or the users of your project are also changing:
- Project planning is expected to be more open - again this is especially true in open source but is often true of proprietary software as well. Customers want to know the roadmap of the projects they use.
- Customers have high expectations for responsiveness - to contributors, to bug reports, suggestions from end users. Customers expect a communications channel such as a newsgroup, mailing list or forum.
The result of all this change is that the technology teams require is also changing. According to Scott the technology needed for today's teams is:
- Interoperability: multiple protocols, multiple clients, multiple services
- Integration
- Extensibility
Therefore the goal of the Eclipse Communication Framework is to lower barriers to team and community communication (for Eclipse) by providing an Interoperable, Integrated, Extensible Framework.
Scott and Ted (remote from Portland) then went on to demo how the framework is integrated with Eclipse so team members can collaborate with each other as they develop. An IRC client was displayed within Eclipse so Scott and Ted could chat with each other. Scott showed how he could share bugs by copying and pasting the bug # into IRC. Shared Editor (over XMTP) automatically took the bug # and converted it to a URL that Ted could use to pull up the bug. Shared Editor also lets you share classes. You can see the other person typing and editing the code and they can navigate you to the particular method/section of their code that they want you to view.
You can also share screen captures easily with others and talk to team members over Skype or chat via IM. You buddy lists from many clients can be displayed within Eclipse. File transfer capabilities are also available.
They've done a lot of work to allow team members to collaborate more easily and be more productive when they are working in today's distributed team environment.
If you're interested in finding out more about ECF and how it works I've uploaded the session slides which covers ECF in more detail.
Download Session Slides (PDF, 252KB)
Technorati Tags: eclipse, eclipsecon, ecf
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