St Patrick’s Day Blues
March 25th, 2008
It was St Patrick’s Day last Monday, and I started the day feeling a little blue rather than green. I was to have spent the weekend in Dublin with my family, but instead found myself at an Eclipse Foundation board meeting in Santa Clara. I’ve recently been elected to the board of the Eclipse Foundation to represent the add-in provider community which includes Ingres and our friends at Laszlo and Red Hat. It was an insightful meeting and getting the opportunity to meet 1200 Eclipse Developers meant that EclipseCon was definitely worth sacrificing my planned St Patrick’s Day in Dublin.
On Tuesday, we announced the availability of Ingres CAFÉ, a community developed bundle that makes it easy for Eclipse developers to get started with Ingres and Eclipse. The bundle was developed by Samrat Dhillon of Carleton University, and we brought Samrat along to EclipseCon so that he could demonstrate it in person. What Samrat has done is to package Ingres, Eclipse (including the Ingres DTP plug-in), Hibernate, Tomcat, and JSF together with a simple installation process that lays down the entire package, with the components hard-wired to work together, with just three clicks. The bundle includes best of breed open source technologies packaged for flexibility. If, for instance, we decide to extend the scope to include Eclipse BIRT or the Spring Framework, it wouldn’t be difficult to do so.
The presentation that I delivered at EclipseCon was a humorous look at using a Sony PS3 for Eclipse development. It was meant as a light-hearted session to end a long day, but to my great surprise I had about a half a dozen attendees stay behind at the end of the presentation to ask questions about floating point arithmetic and building eight node PS3 clusters. Developers! You’ve got to love them!
