Hi everybody, here we are at EclipseCon 2009 in lovely Santa Clara. We've got a guest with ourselves, would you like to introduce yourself? Hey, I'm Jeff McCaffer, I'm the CTO of EclipseSource, and I lead the Eclipse, several projects at Eclipse, in fact, like the runtime project, the PMC, and the Equinox project I co-lead with Tom Watson. I've actually spoken with you at least once, if not a couple times before. We've been covering the Equinox quite a bit. It's good fun, yep. And what I was hoping to talk with you about is essentially just to get an update on what's happening with Equinox, for as many times as we've spoken on this topic, and for as much as Equinox is really, I guess you could say, at the bottom, or at the center, otherwise, of things. We'd like to be there, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious how things have been going in the past year. There's lots of different things happening, you know, in the runtime project as a whole at Eclipse, lots of things are happening, but in Equinox, we've got the new version of the OSCI spec is coming up, and so there's lots of new innovations there, and things in the enterprise expert group, distributed services specifications coming out, and we've got implementations of that RFC 119 specification. It's actually going into the Eclipse communication framework project, so it's not just Equinox, it's a whole runtime kind of constellation of stuff going on. We're touching on one thing that was interesting, and that's sort of the enterprise spec for OSGI, and how, I guess Equinox is sort of an implementation of that to some respect. Parts of it, yeah. The OSGI specs are, there's many of them, and you can sort of choose which ones you want to implement, and so we've implemented a vast majority of the core specification, and now there's enterprise and there's mobile expert group specification as well. We've got some pieces from there, and so we're doing all the cool things, we think, all the cool and useful stuff. Only the stuff people would want, right? Yeah, I mean, the distributed services in particular is quite interesting. Right. But in the whole Equinox sphere of things, and that with P2 as well, our provisioning technology, P2 is really taking off, and lots of people adopting it in different ways. We're doing some cool things with Eclipse distributions, and the EPP wizard is our new download technology
2:05that will be available with Galileo, and that's all based on the P2 technology. Can you tell us a little bit more about P2? Oh, yeah, sure, sure. Because that's one of those things that people are always rabid to know about. It's the constant quest to have the better update manager. And more, of course. Yeah, yeah. So the update manager we had previously was very much tailored to delivering IDEs that were relatively static, and it wasn't really particularly OSGI aware and that sort of thing. And so about a year and a half ago, two years ago, we recognized the deficiency and started on this P2 effort. And Ganymede, which was last year's release, had P2 in it, and now we're refining it, going further, and providing a bunch of tooling around it, and going to actually start delivering Galileo, our next release with P2, using the EPP wizard, which is basically a wrap-based, an Ajax-based wizard that you go and choose the things you want from the download site. Oh, yes, I'm a C guy, but I want some modeling things and some Mylan and that sort of stuff. Right. And then push a button at the end and get a download, get a little installer that comes and sucks all the bytes down for you and that sort of thing. Right. So it's essentially having a sort of custom-built packaging from a user's perspective. You know, and I keep going back to the stackless stack thing that you, you know, came up with whenever that was, a year or two ago. And it really is actually, it captures it very well. I mean, there's so many stacks, so many, there may not be any, so it's a stackless world. And you just go and pick from the menu what it is you want. We were talking this morning about how to deliver runtime technology at Eclipse. We got all this great stuff, you know, from EclipseLink and JPA2 implementations and to BERT, right, reporting stuff. It's not all under the RT project. And so we were talking about, like, what downloads, what packages can we deliver to people? And so, well, put it all in there. Well, that, you know, not everybody needs all of that stuff. Well, put none of it in there. Well, then it's not interesting, right? So the answer, I think, is to provide people with this wizard where basically they can go and say, well, yes, I'm doing servlets. Yes, I want some modeling. Yes, I want some, you know, communication stuff.
4:06And I want some BERT. Right. Check, check, check. Push the button. Now you've got your stack. And it's your stack, not my stack. My stack has something else in it, right? So I think that's where we're going with the whole P2 story. And, of course, people can use it to deliver their own, you know, integrate it with their applications and deliver their own stuff. We just sort of talked, we talked about P2 and using Equinox as being built on top of that to sort of build the custom packaging and configuration. But, of course, I mean, Equinox is, of course, like a back-end technology. Obviously, in the server world, the web app servers, they are, all the major vendors have adopted OSGI, and most of those are using Equinox. So we're seeing, of course, WebSphere has long since been using Equinox under the covers, and the Spring DM guys, and I'm trying to think of them all now, the Paramus guys. Right. And everybody's basically, I saw the Glassfish team demoing. Right, that's right, that's right. They were at a boff, and they were demoing Glassfish's OSGI base, and it runs on Felix, the Apache implementation, and it runs on Equinox. And so, like, they were demoing that yesterday. And so it's really in a server world. I think OSGI and Equinox are really coming to the fore now. All the different major vendors are adopting it. SAP has announced they're moving NetWeaver onto Equinox. So, you know, this is a really big deal. One of the things that we've discussed in the past is, you know, if you're moving to using Equinox or OSGI or whatever, there's a somewhat different programming model that you have to follow. And how have you seen that programming model play out? It's a double-edged sword a little bit, because one of the values we try to put forward of this is you get one programming model for all the different platforms. So I did a talk yesterday where I demoed stuff that was running embedded, stuff that was running a rich client platform, things that were running wholly server-side headless, and stuff that was running server-side with an AJAX UI. And that was all programmed with bundles, all programmed with extensions and services, like standard OSGI, Equinox, Eclipse kinds of technologies.
6:06And the same tool chain, the same developer skills, the same mindset and programming model, the same bundles, the same code pieces were being deployed, used in all of those different runtime scenarios. And I think that's where the real value comes in, is you don't have to have a bunch of PHP guys to do your web UI and a bunch of embedded guys to do your, you know, the mid-lit guys, you know, doing your embedded part and all that sort of thing. The programming model itself, so that's the value part, right? The downside, I guess, is that it is a non, I don't want to say non-standard, but it's a lot of people know how to program Java, moving and doing bundles. Well, it's a new way to package up. It's a new way to package stuff, and the power of Equinox and OSGI doesn't come for free. There's a bit of stuff you have to do, there's some markup, and, you know, if you're going to have somebody manage your dependencies, you have to say what your dependencies are, right? There's no free lunch, right? So you actually have to express that stuff, and we've got really good tooling that's been developed over many years in the plug-in development environment, and that's been refined. We've got new tooling for declarative services, so declarative services allow you to put all this stuff together declaratively and use OSGI services like that, so the new tooling there is really very helpful. Last time we talked to you with IBM, and now, as your shirt says, you're with EclipseSource, and so what's been the story of, because it was actually, it was cloud nine, if I remember. Code nine. Code nine, that's right. We thought of cloud nine, too, but it was code nine, yeah. But, so there was another, you had your own sort of little company in between there merge together. About a year and a bit ago, I left IBM and started code nine, and that was all focused around runtime technologies and that sort of thing, and we grew to about five people or so over the year, and... Yeah, you have a little Austin office, if I remember. Well, we do, yeah, we got, now, so what happened in about November last year, Interpract, the company behind RAP and G-Eclipse and EPP and the packaging stuff at Eclipse, it's a German company, we merged, so Code nine and Interpract have merged, and now we've formed a new company
8:06called EclipseSource, lots of stuff in the runtime technology area, we're heavily involved in Eclipse itself, of course, lots of people on the board and PMCs and, you know, leading like 10 projects and that sort of stuff. Thanks for taking all this time to talk with us today. Sure, thank you.