1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:08,000 Hello everybody. Here we are at EclipseCon in lovely Santa Clara and we've got another guest with ourselves. Would you like to introduce yourself? 2 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:12,000 Sure. Hi, my name is Wayne Parrott. I'm with Genua Tech. I'm the Vice President of Product Development. 3 00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:16,000 You're very involved in the Eclipse world, building your product portfolio on top of it essentially. 4 00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:20,000 But for folks who don't know you that well, can you give us a quick introduction of what Genua Tech does? 5 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:24,000 We're an Eclipse technology company. We've been involved in the Eclipse movement since it was first open source. 6 00:00:24,000 --> 00:00:29,000 So we've been developing products actively for almost seven years now. 7 00:00:29,000 --> 00:00:35,000 On top of Eclipse, we service our Eclipse developer tools and Eclipse plug-in management and distribution. 8 00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:40,000 I remember coming across you way back when, you know, my Eclipse was the first thing that you had. 9 00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:44,000 And by that I don't mean my Eclipse. It's actually called my Eclipse. 10 00:00:44,000 --> 00:00:49,000 And so, I mean, that was sort of like if I remember the first product that you guys had. 11 00:00:49,000 --> 00:00:58,000 And it seems like a lot of the portfolio that you have is sort of built upon that same basic idea of packaging up a bunch of Eclipse stuff and adding in some of your own stuff. 12 00:00:58,000 --> 00:01:02,000 And having like a pretty, actually a pretty affordable IDE that people, that developers can buy. 13 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:05,000 Exactly, yeah. The first product is my Eclipse Enterprise Workbench. 14 00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:07,000 We now have three levels of that. 15 00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:12,000 We first rolled out with a real simple entry level, sold it at $30 level. 16 00:01:12,000 --> 00:01:19,000 And then we've now got a pro level version, which builds beyond kind of the traditional Java EE developer tools and technologies. 17 00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:24,000 And then we added, this last year, we added what we call the blue edition of my Eclipse. 18 00:01:24,000 --> 00:01:30,000 And that is for, targeted specifically for WebSphere and IBM Rational developers. 19 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:33,000 They're looking for alternative development tools. 20 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:40,000 In addition to the my Eclipse developer tools, we branched out this last year into the area of plug-in management and distribution. 21 00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:47,000 Or really, you can think of it as Eclipse product management distribution, which has not been a well-served community. 22 00:01:47,000 --> 00:01:55,000 But with the advent of the RCP platform, we're seeing a lot of business type of applications and desktop applications, 23 00:01:55,000 --> 00:01:58,000 which are built on top of the same technology, plug-ins and all. 24 00:01:58,000 --> 00:01:59,000 And we have a product called Pulse. 25 00:01:59,000 --> 00:02:05,000 And Pulse is geared towards servicing both, helping developers build their own tool stacks, 26 00:02:05,000 --> 00:02:13,000 but also in addition to that, manage enterprise and global level distribution of RCP apps. 27 00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:18,000 In addition to people using Pulse to sort of, like you were saying, I'm kind of repeating what you're saying, 28 00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:24,000 but to manage their own development tool set, if you will, there's people who have built things on top of Eclipse RCP. 29 00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:29,000 And they can use Pulse as sort of like a configuration mechanism, or they are using Pulse. 30 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:30,000 Yeah, absolutely. 31 00:02:30,000 --> 00:02:32,000 We've got some very large distributions already. 32 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:36,000 One version of our Pulse product is a customizable. 33 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:39,000 It's called Pulse private label, which means it can completely be reskinned. 34 00:02:39,000 --> 00:02:43,000 It's a, you know, a customer hosted type solution. 35 00:02:43,000 --> 00:02:46,000 And we've got a couple of distributions that are out there right now. 36 00:02:46,000 --> 00:02:52,000 One's managing over 200,000 install sites of a particular customer service application. 37 00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:57,000 One of the interesting things about Pulse is the sort of, I don't know, sort of the social aspect around it. 38 00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:00,000 You know, there's sort of reviews and people can write things up like that. 39 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:03,000 And I wonder how that's been going for it. 40 00:03:03,000 --> 00:03:06,000 It's been coming along pretty well. 41 00:03:06,000 --> 00:03:11,000 Really, our biggest uptake has been on the enterprise level. 42 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:11,000 Yeah. 43 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:14,000 So there's not a lot of social aspects around that. 44 00:03:14,000 --> 00:03:24,000 But also, the entry level points for Pulse are there's a community edition that allows you to do individual, kind of put together your own tool stack and be able to access it from anywhere. 45 00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:25,000 It's a hosted solution. 46 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:26,000 And that's free. 47 00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:30,000 And then in addition, we have what's called a team edition for Pulse. 48 00:03:30,000 --> 00:03:31,000 Right. 49 00:03:31,000 --> 00:03:34,000 And that's for small or any size developer team. 50 00:03:34,000 --> 00:03:42,000 But it's really geared around putting together, you know, your tool stack, being able to share it with your team, do updates and that kind of thing. 51 00:03:42,000 --> 00:04:01,000 And then also we're building in more social networking type of capabilities so that, you know, as people talk about, talk back and forth, especially in virtual team environments, that kind of interaction and, you know, be able to have everybody kind of share a context is something that Pulse is expanding out into. 52 00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:02,000 Yeah. 53 00:04:02,000 --> 00:04:11,000 I remember when I first heard about that part, it made me remember back when Emacs was sort of like the IDE to liberally use that term of choice. 54 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:17,000 You know, everyone was into sharing their .emacs files to sort of like show off the configuration that they had and all their stuff like that. 55 00:04:17,000 --> 00:04:18,000 You were old. 56 00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:25,000 Speaking of enterprise, one of the other things you mentioned was the blue edition that you have that services sort of the web sphere world. 57 00:04:25,000 --> 00:04:43,000 That's actually been something that we've, for quite a few years, we've provided an application server connector in our MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench tooling for web sphere, for basically allowing J2E developers to be able to interact, deploy and test and debug against web sphere. 58 00:04:43,000 --> 00:04:52,000 But it wasn't very good because web sphere is kind of a, it's a very different animal with, you know, relative to most of the other applications, J2E application servers that are out there. 59 00:04:52,000 --> 00:05:03,000 We had a number of customers that were complaining about looking at RAD, well, IBM's rational tooling, and asking us, like, hey, we love everything you've got. 60 00:05:03,000 --> 00:05:09,000 Because our feature sets were, the features that we supported were actually much richer than what RAD was providing. 61 00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:12,000 And they were buying MyEclipse and RAD in addition. 62 00:05:12,000 --> 00:05:15,000 They're like, can you help us just improve your connector? 63 00:05:15,000 --> 00:05:16,000 Right. 64 00:05:16,000 --> 00:05:17,000 They wanted to consolidate the new tool. 65 00:05:17,000 --> 00:05:18,000 Right. 66 00:05:18,000 --> 00:05:21,000 So they were like, just give us a better web sphere integration story. 67 00:05:21,000 --> 00:05:38,000 In addition to that, when IBM basically discontinued support for the WSAD 5.1, which is the predecessor for rational application developer, that left a number of really big companies just hanging. 68 00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:42,000 And so they immediately called us and said, we're looking for an alternative right now. 69 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:43,000 How can you help us? 70 00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:47,000 And then also help us with supporting our old 5.1 projects. 71 00:05:47,000 --> 00:05:53,000 And then also give us a pathway to be able to upgrade and adopt some of the newer J2E technology. 72 00:05:53,000 --> 00:06:05,000 So right out of the box, you know, we have a lot of interest from a lot of corporate customers that have a long legacy support issue with their WSAD projects. 73 00:06:05,000 --> 00:06:14,000 So, and we've been supporting web sphere 5.1, you know, going way back, you know, that app server and the tool stack, you know, in our traditional tool. 74 00:06:14,000 --> 00:06:27,000 And that influenced us to actually step back and look at what are the things we can do for a developer that's specifically focused on supporting, has to develop and deploy to web sphere 5.1, 6.1, 7. 75 00:06:27,000 --> 00:06:32,000 You know, that whole lineage of versions of web sphere. 76 00:06:32,000 --> 00:06:33,000 Sort of multi-web sphere deployment. 77 00:06:33,000 --> 00:06:34,000 Right. 78 00:06:34,000 --> 00:06:37,000 And we've supported them and we know them pretty, we know them actually very well. 79 00:06:37,000 --> 00:06:44,000 So we said, but let's just push the MyEclipse tool set a little bit further out and focus specifically on web sphere developers. 80 00:06:44,000 --> 00:06:48,000 And so that led us to release Blue last year and then we've continued to support. 81 00:06:48,000 --> 00:07:04,000 Two weeks ago we rolled out MyEclipse 7.1 which allows MyEclipse users that have a, basically allows MyEclipse to be able to operate on top of RAD projects. 82 00:07:04,000 --> 00:07:05,000 Right, right. 83 00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:08,000 So right now there's no, so they're not. 84 00:07:08,000 --> 00:07:12,000 So MyEclipse is compatible with the project that RAD, the stuff that RAD puts out. 85 00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:17,000 Right, so you just fire up MyEclipse, point it at your RAD project, suck it in, boom, away you go. 86 00:07:17,000 --> 00:07:25,000 So you're able to run on top of the same project structure, you know, and you know, don't have to upgrade or do anything like that with your projects. 87 00:07:25,000 --> 00:07:27,000 What's the uptake of the Blue stuff then? 88 00:07:27,000 --> 00:07:34,000 It's been very good, especially with the, you know, the economy's driving, some customers are evaluating. 89 00:07:34,000 --> 00:07:38,000 Others are looking at they want to be able to move quicker on certain technologies 90 00:07:38,000 --> 00:07:41,000 and RAD hasn't moved at the velocity that they, you know, of their interest. 91 00:07:41,000 --> 00:07:44,000 And so we have a very rapid, you know, delivery cycle. 92 00:07:44,000 --> 00:07:48,000 So we usually release every two months, have upgrades constantly. 93 00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:53,000 And we take a lot of customer feedback and try to turn that back into our product iterations as we move forward. 94 00:07:53,000 --> 00:07:56,000 And you guys have also been doing some mobile stuff, if I remember correctly, right? 95 00:07:56,000 --> 00:07:57,000 Yes, absolutely. 96 00:07:57,000 --> 00:08:00,000 I'm leading a new mobile web initiative. 97 00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:02,000 And we've got two aspects of that. 98 00:08:02,000 --> 00:08:05,000 One is there's an open source component and then a commercial component. 99 00:08:05,000 --> 00:08:11,000 Our commercial component is known as, excuse me, it's known as the mobile web studio. 100 00:08:11,000 --> 00:08:18,000 Our focus there is on, we've already, we've been developing web developer tools for a number of years. 101 00:08:18,000 --> 00:08:24,000 And we've had a number of customers that have come to us specifically as the iPhone has gained more and more popularity. 102 00:08:24,000 --> 00:08:30,000 Our customers have asked and said, hey, what we want to do is we want to be able to target some of our web content 103 00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:34,000 or we want to be able to have some of our services in a play on the iPhone. 104 00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:35,000 Right. 105 00:08:35,000 --> 00:08:41,000 The, you know, the party line has been that, oh, well, in order to have a really good iPhone experience, 106 00:08:41,000 --> 00:08:43,000 you're going to have to write native. 107 00:08:43,000 --> 00:08:45,000 It's going to require Objective-C. 108 00:08:45,000 --> 00:08:48,000 You're going to have to go through App Store to deployment. 109 00:08:48,000 --> 00:08:50,000 And they just, like, it's a complete turn off. 110 00:08:50,000 --> 00:08:52,000 It's kind of like, oh, I go through this whole lock-in thing. 111 00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:54,000 So the question we've gotten is, like, I've got all these web developers. 112 00:08:54,000 --> 00:08:59,000 You know, what would you do, GenuaTech, you know, if you were trying to address this? 113 00:08:59,000 --> 00:09:04,000 So we sat down and we looked at, over the last year we've been following the advances in, you know, 114 00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:10,000 the traditional HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and all of them have moved. 115 00:09:10,000 --> 00:09:16,000 There have been key advances that have made it very attractive to build some really compelling UIs 116 00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:19,000 on top of that technology base. 117 00:09:19,000 --> 00:09:22,000 Enterprise customers that are interested in targeting for the iPhone are, 118 00:09:22,000 --> 00:09:27,000 they want an iPhone-type look and feel or an iPhone theme in their web applications. 119 00:09:27,000 --> 00:09:30,000 So it doesn't have to be perfect, but get it close. 120 00:09:30,000 --> 00:09:37,000 So what we've been demonstrating here at EclipseCon is an early release version that we have of 121 00:09:37,000 --> 00:09:44,000 Mobile Web Studio that demonstrates a picture-perfect type of what-you-see-what-you-get type of environment. 122 00:09:44,000 --> 00:09:45,000 And it's all in web technologies. 123 00:09:45,000 --> 00:09:50,000 It's all built on top of, right, it's built on top of a custom version of WebKit for SWT. 124 00:09:50,000 --> 00:10:00,000 And we're going to be open sourcing that through our affiliation or leadership on a project called Blinky, which was just approved. 125 00:10:00,000 --> 00:10:08,000 The story behind Blinky, I always have to tell it, when we wrote the original proposal for a mobile web developer tool stack through Eclipse, 126 00:10:08,000 --> 00:10:12,000 when I wrote that, it was originally called Firefly. 127 00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:16,000 And due to some naming conflict issues, we had to rename it. 128 00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:21,000 And as a result, we thought, well, everybody was telling us, we love the Firefly theme. 129 00:10:21,000 --> 00:10:22,000 Sorry, you have to change the name. 130 00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:31,000 So Blinky, spelled with a B-L-I-N-K-I, is the Jamaican English word for Firefly. 131 00:10:31,000 --> 00:10:32,000 Firefly. 132 00:10:32,000 --> 00:10:34,000 So we just stuck with, it's just a Blinky bug. 133 00:10:34,000 --> 00:10:38,000 It's also one of Matt Groenig's, like, rabbit characters, if I remember. 134 00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:41,000 Like, remember before The Simpsons, he had a bunch of characters that were rabbits? 135 00:10:41,000 --> 00:10:42,000 And I think Blinky was one of them. 136 00:10:42,000 --> 00:10:48,000 Yeah, other people have asked us if it's related to the Pac-Man. 137 00:10:48,000 --> 00:10:49,000 Oh, yeah. 138 00:10:49,000 --> 00:10:51,000 I think it was the little ghost guy or something. 139 00:10:51,000 --> 00:10:54,000 Yeah, and I think the three-eyed fish in The Simpsons was named Blinky, right? 140 00:10:54,000 --> 00:10:55,000 Blinky. 141 00:10:55,000 --> 00:11:02,000 It's interesting because there is, I see a lot of, I guess you would call them web developers 142 00:11:02,000 --> 00:11:07,000 who, they're fine doing web applications and everything, but there's, they're more, they're 143 00:11:07,000 --> 00:11:11,000 slightly interested in other options that they have to use their web development techniques 144 00:11:11,000 --> 00:11:16,000 to get to other platforms, whether that's like desktop RIAs or in the mobile devices and 145 00:11:16,000 --> 00:11:17,000 things like that. 146 00:11:17,000 --> 00:11:21,000 And like you're saying, I mean, it is, I mean, it's the cliche to say it, but it is remarkable 147 00:11:21,000 --> 00:11:24,000 how much the iPhone motivates people to just develop for it. 148 00:11:24,000 --> 00:11:25,000 Oh, absolutely. 149 00:11:25,000 --> 00:11:30,000 It's really the new, set a new benchmark and establish the mindshare about what a 150 00:11:30,000 --> 00:11:33,000 smartphone really is and what it should look like, you know, going forward. 151 00:11:33,000 --> 00:11:40,000 So it set a new baseline to, you've got to clear that bar, you know, going forward to be cool. 152 00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:44,000 And so does Blinky address other platforms, like other mobile platforms? 153 00:11:44,000 --> 00:11:45,000 It will. 154 00:11:45,000 --> 00:11:46,000 It will. 155 00:11:46,000 --> 00:11:50,000 Actually, Blinky, the open source component of that is really meant to build a community 156 00:11:50,000 --> 00:11:57,000 of not just, well, okay, Apple's not a player in the Eclipse ecosystem. 157 00:11:57,000 --> 00:11:58,000 Right. 158 00:11:58,000 --> 00:11:59,000 I mean, they've opted out of that. 159 00:11:59,000 --> 00:12:07,000 What we're doing is part of, by supporting the iPhone with our efforts, is it establishes, 160 00:12:07,000 --> 00:12:09,000 everybody can identify with it very quickly. 161 00:12:09,000 --> 00:12:12,000 You know, it sells itself is probably the best way to describe it. 162 00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:13,000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 163 00:12:13,000 --> 00:12:15,000 It's what the market is demanding at the moment. 164 00:12:15,000 --> 00:12:16,000 Absolutely. 165 00:12:16,000 --> 00:12:17,000 Yeah. 166 00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:22,000 But the other carriers, I mean, the other handsets, RIM, you know, the Nokia's, Motorola's, 167 00:12:22,000 --> 00:12:24,000 others are also very interested. 168 00:12:24,000 --> 00:12:37,000 And, again, Blinky is initially focused on what we're contributing to the project is web kit-based technology for handsets that support web kit, 169 00:12:37,000 --> 00:12:39,000 the newer versions of web kit. 170 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:40,000 We're concentrating on that. 171 00:12:40,000 --> 00:12:41,000 So it's 2009. 172 00:12:41,000 --> 00:12:44,000 Going forward is really kind of where our initial interest is. 173 00:12:44,000 --> 00:12:46,000 And so we've talked to RIM. 174 00:12:46,000 --> 00:12:52,000 They're already very interested in increasing their activity here at Eclipse. 175 00:12:52,000 --> 00:12:59,000 So definitely want to be working with them more, supporting some of the storms and their product line going forward as well. 176 00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:02,000 While the iPhone's a competitor for RIM and all these other people, 177 00:13:02,000 --> 00:13:06,000 it's also nice to take advantage of renewed interest in developing for the mobile platform. 178 00:13:06,000 --> 00:13:07,000 Oh, yeah. 179 00:13:07,000 --> 00:13:13,000 That the mobile web based on the newer -- we call it JCH, JavaScript, CSS3, HTML. 180 00:13:13,000 --> 00:13:14,000 Oh, right, right. 181 00:13:14,000 --> 00:13:24,000 The JCH technology stack, the newer version, 2009 version, is really compelling in what you can develop. 182 00:13:24,000 --> 00:13:29,000 And some of the examples -- I mean, some of the demos and stuff we were showing here, it was a showstopper. 183 00:13:29,000 --> 00:13:32,000 Everybody that walked by our booth, they were like, "I've got to see that." 184 00:13:32,000 --> 00:13:37,000 Because they could not believe that it was basically a web application running 185 00:13:37,000 --> 00:13:44,000 because it was so themed out in a very almost pixel perfect level for the iPhone theme. 186 00:13:44,000 --> 00:13:45,000 Great. 187 00:13:45,000 --> 00:13:48,000 Well, that was a pretty nice update of what GenuaTech's up to. 188 00:13:48,000 --> 00:13:49,000 Great. 189 00:13:49,000 --> 00:13:50,000 Thanks for taking all this time with us. 190 00:13:50,000 --> 00:13:51,000 Well, thank you.