The Ottawa Eclipse Demo camp was tonight and I thought I’d write about it before I went to bed. The demos were quite interesting, a different mix than before which keeps it fresh. And the hospitality of the Foundation staff was awesome again.

I was especially intrigued by Nick Edgar’s embedded web UI demo that he’s working on as part of Jazz. This is something I thought of doing for my talk at ESE. Present information in a web page using Eclipse’s embedded browser. And then have JavaScript on that page interact with the surrounding Eclipse environment. The workflow he showed was very clean and I think there are some pretty cool things we can do with this. The technique he used was quite a kludge and even he admits it (communicating through the status bar?) But the SWT guys are thinking of better ways and I can’t wait to try this myself.

The other interesting demo was from the Zeligsoft gang. I worked with some of the fellows that started Zeligsoft. We were part of the Rose RealTime development team. It was interesting to see the product they’ve come up with and the simularities it has with the stuff we did back then. They’re betting the farm on model driven development. I can’t say whether they’ll succeed or not, but they’ve done a few things better, but a lot is the same.

I also have to thank Boris and Eric for their demos on e4 and the model-based UI in particular. I have a better sense of what they are trying to accomplish. Whether it’s better or not than what we have today, I’m not sold yet. But I’ll have to give it some hands on before making a final judgement.

I also got some interesting feedback on my article on IBM and Eclipse. (BTW, it’s not whether we can survive, it’s that we better plan and make sure we can, which I think we’re finally doing). There were a lot of IBMers at the Demo Camp which was good to see. And there were as many ex-IBMers there too. I think it’s pretty healthy. The Eclipse expertise is spreading throughout our small and tight knit town and Ottawa has a great concentration of Eclipse expertise, which makes it a great place to be.