We are at EclipseCon, 2008, in lovely Santa Clara. Andy, would you like to introduce yourself? I'm Neil Bartlett. I'm a Java developer and consultant. I work in London for one of the biggest banks there. And I'm a user of OSGI and Equinox and Eclipse. One of the things I wanted to ask you about, because I missed this session, was the E4 session. And I was actually doing another video in this little series with Eric Hamlin. He was telling me a little bit about it and he was saying, you know, the idea is essentially a bigger embrace of the web. You know, kind of like having a web feel more in England. It looks like there's certainly a focus on making all these things that we can do in rich clients available in thin clients as in web browsers. Right, right. And we've already seen some of that with Rapp, where you can take literally the same code for a rich client application and run it as a web application. And you can even do that with the IDE itself, it looks like. So they're saying there might be some value in doing that. Well, you know, still, of course, other people want to keep the rich client. Do you think that's kind of like Air and Silverlight sort of RIA stuff or a completely different sort of thing? I think there's a whole kind of... Or Prism even, like, you know, from the Mozilla thing? Sure, yeah. It looks similar. Right. Of course, the Eclipse one is based on Ajax, so you don't need a separate runtime on the client at the moment. But it's all just part of the exploration of this space, I think. Right. And I think Eclipse is going to work nicely with those solutions. I mean, if some people don't like Ajax that much and they do like Flex, there's some guys working on Flex integration with OSGI and Eclipse. So I think Eclipse is going to be part of the runtime, certainly on the server side, to support any or all of these technologies. The other thing I was curious to just, you know, hear your take on is that's, you know, one of the big Eclipse here and now things is having all the Equinauts and OSGI and things.
2:00Is that something you've been encountering in your own work a lot or is it more of just a good idea at this point or is it something you've gotten your hands dirty with? Yeah, I mean, it's a very good model because you have this very strong component model now. Right. And very strong reusability. I think people are noticing that by actually putting yourself in a box and restricting what you depend on and declaring explicitly what you offer to other people, you enormously increase the reuse of your code and the robustness of your code. And, of course, that's been very beneficial in Eclipse because it's a very large and dynamically changing platform. Right. Very varied platform. It's a nice way to organize everything, right? Exactly, yeah. And it's the same on the server side. So, you basically strip off all of the, you strip off the IDE first and then the GUI itself from Eclipse and you end up with something which is useful not just on client side but on servers and even embedded devices. And do you like that idea of the story that you sort of have the one thing that can spread different deployment options as far as, you know, you have the servers and mobile devices and it's the same common programming model across all those things? I mean, it always sounds nice but I wonder if people... Well, it's about reuse of your developers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot of places that are doing .NET development on the client side and Java development on the server side. Right. Which means you really have to have two teams because it's very difficult to hire people who are very good at both Java and .NET. Right. But if you have a strong model that can be used on both the client and the server side based on Java and OSGi to make that really work well. So, in theory, you could have the same people on your sort of computer screen, if you will, doing the programming as would on like a tiny handheld screen or something? If it's something which is a component reusable across those two worlds. Right. So, what was the OSGi on Android stuff you were talking about? I mean, other than the obvious idea of running OSGi on Android. Well, that's really all it was. It was just an experiment, you know. Yeah. We've got this new platform or Google released this new platform and it looks a lot like Java. It's not quite Java.
4:00Right. And we have a platform which we've found to be very useful on Java. And we just wanted to experiment, can we use this on Android? And then if we can, which we found that we could, just let other people experiment with how that's useful. Right. So, it's just something we've put out there as a successful experiment. You know, it works. Now, let's find out whether and how it's useful to run OSGi components on Android. Well, unless there was anything else you wanted to mention. That was fun. Nothing that pops into my head at the moment. Well, it's great. Thanks. I appreciate it. Very nice to talk to you.