As I mentioned in a previous post, last week I attended to the Eclipse Banking Day in London. It was an enriching experience for me, not only in terms of speaking in a foreign language in front of large crowd but also seeing what other financial institutions are doing with Eclipse. I also met great people, during and after the event, so, who could ask for more? It was a really great event!

Most of the presentations are now available on the event wiki page. I encourage you to take a look to some of them. Anyway, here there are some few personal thoughts about the presentations:

  • Mike Milinkovich shared with us the Eclipse Foundation vision towards collaborative software development of tomorrow. He explained that in 3 years banks will collaborate on a common platform, where Eclipse could play a key role, and therefore banks will be able to focus all of their possible energies on what really provides them a competitive differentiation. I really wish it happens, but even though we have started seeing some proposals/incubators projects, like Financial Platform or Open Financial Market Platform, I believe we will spend a few more years before it becomes mainstream. Hopefully I’m wrong!
  • It was also great to share a picture slide with Mike. The maturity model for OSS adoption is a great indicator of OSS engagement, not just for ISV’s but also for enterprises.
  • Mike also introduced e4, the next generation of Eclipse, and its 3 key architecturals goals: Eclipse platform as services, modeled and declarative UI, and SWT for the web. Related to the last one, have you ever wondered how the Eclipse IDE could look like if it was a browser-based? well, then take a look at this post. Sounds interesting, isn’t it?
  • Neil Bartlett did a great talk about OSGI. I liked the Stackless Stack reference.
  • Damm, I missed Tas Frangoullides’s presentation about MDD and SOA at Barclays. For what I have seen on the slides, it sounds like a really interesting initiative.
  • Miles Daffin, from Morgan Stanley, talked about provisioning in a large environment and some really strong installation policies. This is a great topic, because most of the big enterprises share the same requirements from the IT security guys, albeit we usually don’t discuss them in public: no downloads from Internet, no unapproved software installations, … So Miles’s talk about how they solved these requirements was really worth. And I totally agree him regarding provisioning: “Eclipse is not designed with enterprise users in mind”. So … lots of work for the P2 folks!
  • Jeremy Nelson explained J.P. Morgan’s OneBench platform for trading applications based on Eclipse RCP. It was really great, but … wish he had included some pictures about the platfom.
  • Sven Efftinge‘s presentation was about DSL frameworks and tools. He introduced the Eclipse modelling stack and he showed a real external DSL implementation using TMF Xtext and GMF. There are few DSL real examples that becomes public, so it is always a pleasure when someone explains one of them in a event. These guys from itemis are doing an incredible job.
  • And the last one, Ferran Rodenas talked about la Caixa’s software factory approach using Domain Specific Modeling Languages. His talk was … well, we could summarize it as he did what he could! 🙂

And that’s all folks. Any other attendees would like to share their thoughts?