1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,000 We are at EclipseCon, 2008, in lovely Santa Clara. 2 00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:07,000 Andy, would you like to introduce yourself? 3 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:11,000 I'm Neil Bartlett. I'm a Java developer and consultant. 4 00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:15,000 I work in London for one of the biggest banks there. 5 00:00:15,000 --> 00:00:19,000 And I'm a user of OSGI and Equinox and Eclipse. 6 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:23,000 One of the things I wanted to ask you about, because I missed this session, was the E4 session. 7 00:00:23,000 --> 00:00:28,000 And I was actually doing another video in this little series with Eric Hamlin. 8 00:00:28,000 --> 00:00:34,000 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. 9 00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:37,000 You know, kind of like having a web feel more in England. 10 00:00:37,000 --> 00:00:47,000 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. 11 00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:48,000 Right, right. 12 00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:56,000 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. 13 00:00:56,000 --> 00:01:00,000 And you can even do that with the IDE itself, it looks like. 14 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:04,000 So they're saying there might be some value in doing that. 15 00:01:04,000 --> 00:01:07,000 Well, you know, still, of course, other people want to keep the rich client. 16 00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:12,000 Do you think that's kind of like Air and Silverlight sort of RIA stuff or a completely different sort of thing? 17 00:01:12,000 --> 00:01:16,000 I think there's a whole kind of... 18 00:01:16,000 --> 00:01:18,000 Or Prism even, like, you know, from the Mozilla thing? 19 00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:19,000 Sure, yeah. 20 00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:20,000 It looks similar. 21 00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:21,000 Right. 22 00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:27,000 Of course, the Eclipse one is based on Ajax, so you don't need a separate runtime on the client at the moment. 23 00:01:27,000 --> 00:01:31,000 But it's all just part of the exploration of this space, I think. 24 00:01:31,000 --> 00:01:32,000 Right. 25 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:37,000 And I think Eclipse is going to work nicely with those solutions. 26 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:46,000 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. 27 00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:53,000 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. 28 00:01:53,000 --> 00:02:00,000 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. 29 00:02:00,000 --> 00:02:06,000 Is 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? 30 00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:11,000 Yeah, I mean, it's a very good model because you have this very strong component model now. 31 00:02:11,000 --> 00:02:12,000 Right. 32 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:14,000 And very strong reusability. 33 00:02:14,000 --> 00:02:32,000 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. 34 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:39,000 And, of course, that's been very beneficial in Eclipse because it's a very large and dynamically changing platform. 35 00:02:39,000 --> 00:02:40,000 Right. 36 00:02:40,000 --> 00:02:41,000 Very varied platform. 37 00:02:41,000 --> 00:02:43,000 It's a nice way to organize everything, right? 38 00:02:43,000 --> 00:02:44,000 Exactly, yeah. 39 00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:45,000 And it's the same on the server side. 40 00:02:45,000 --> 00:02:56,000 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. 41 00:02:56,000 --> 00:03:08,000 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? 42 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:10,000 I mean, it always sounds nice but I wonder if people... 43 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:12,000 Well, it's about reuse of your developers. 44 00:03:12,000 --> 00:03:13,000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 45 00:03:13,000 --> 00:03:19,000 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. 46 00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:20,000 Right. 47 00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:25,000 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. 48 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:26,000 Right. 49 00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:33,000 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. 50 00:03:33,000 --> 00:03:41,000 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? 51 00:03:41,000 --> 00:03:45,000 If it's something which is a component reusable across those two worlds. 52 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:46,000 Right. 53 00:03:46,000 --> 00:03:48,000 So, what was the OSGi on Android stuff you were talking about? 54 00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:52,000 I mean, other than the obvious idea of running OSGi on Android. 55 00:03:52,000 --> 00:03:53,000 Well, that's really all it was. 56 00:03:53,000 --> 00:03:54,000 It was just an experiment, you know. 57 00:03:54,000 --> 00:03:55,000 Yeah. 58 00:03:55,000 --> 00:03:59,000 We've got this new platform or Google released this new platform and it looks a lot like Java. 59 00:03:59,000 --> 00:04:00,000 It's not quite Java. 60 00:04:00,000 --> 00:04:01,000 Right. 61 00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:06,000 And we have a platform which we've found to be very useful on Java. 62 00:04:06,000 --> 00:04:11,000 And we just wanted to experiment, can we use this on Android? 63 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:17,000 And then if we can, which we found that we could, just let other people experiment with how that's useful. 64 00:04:17,000 --> 00:04:18,000 Right. 65 00:04:18,000 --> 00:04:22,000 So, it's just something we've put out there as a successful experiment. 66 00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:23,000 You know, it works. 67 00:04:23,000 --> 00:04:28,000 Now, let's find out whether and how it's useful to run OSGi components on Android. 68 00:04:28,000 --> 00:04:30,000 Well, unless there was anything else you wanted to mention. 69 00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:31,000 That was fun. 70 00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:33,000 Nothing that pops into my head at the moment. 71 00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:34,000 Well, it's great. 72 00:04:34,000 --> 00:04:35,000 Thanks. 73 00:04:35,000 --> 00:04:36,000 I appreciate it. 74 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:37,000 Very nice to talk to you.