Following on from New York's December event, last week's Eclipse Banking Day in London saw 80+ attendees discuss the use of Eclipse in banking. Sponsored by the Eclipse foundation, in conjunction with Sybase, Cloudsmith, Actuate, Itemis and WeigleWilczek, there were eleven presentations and four short talks by members of the banking and Eclipse communities. Not all presentations will be available, but those that are have been posted on Eclipse wiki, according to Ian Skerret of the Eclipse Foundation.
OneBench, the Eclipse 2007 commercial deployment winner, was presented by Jeremy Nelson, highlighting both the benefit of a shared platform for deployment as well as the advantages of an internally open codebase for shared code. Replicating Eclipse's fixed-week build and release philosophy, the platform continues to evolve by shared development across teams.
Collaboration was the theme that opened the event; Eclipse's Mike Milinkovich's discussion on the benefits of the Eclipse platform highlighted both the shared cost reductions that come from opening commodity implementations but still permitting differentiating features to be built upon an open framework. He also highlighted Eclipse's strong IP Policy as a key factor in the success of projects hosted and run by Eclipse members. Having just celebrated the 5th birthday of the Eclipse foundation, and with 190 members and 900 committers contributing to 110 projects, the strength of the Eclipse foundation as a diverse set of projects (and more than just an IDE) is there to be seen. External projects like Jetty are even in the process of migrating to Eclipse, dual-licensed under the Eclipse and Apache licenses.
The subject of Eclipse provisioning was also raised, with both Miles Daffin and Jeremy Nelson presenting two different ways of managing Eclipse installs across a variety of hosts. The conclusion was that whilst P2 might bring some technical advances, the ability to 'lock down' an Eclipse install or overlay an organisation-wide security policy is much more problematic than with earlier Eclipse releases.
Modeling and reporting were heavily discussed items, with presentations on BIRT and model-driven architecture, including the use of XText to generate both a domain specific language and a custom Eclipse editor for the same. Whilst some in the audience would have liked to see an XText grammar for a specific XML format demonstrated, the use of XText to infer a grammar from samples of code is an open idea.
Lastly, project proposals like Open Financial Market Platform and Financial Platform/Credit Management are being sponsored by players in the financial field, with project plans leading to code releases later this year or next.