Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The Mother of All Panels

Ed Burnette seems to have suspended his obsession with Google and GWT, for now, and has become active once again in the Eclipse world. Welcome back, Ed :)

The latest cause Ed has been championing is the official expansion of the PDE mandate. Of course, he is not the first one to do so, but he is certainly the most skilled at mobilizing the base. Observe how within a couple of hours, Dave Orme was already talking escalating the matter to the Board of Directors. Even Karl Rove or James Carville are not as good as Ed.

Of course, not everybody is as much of a PDE enthusiast as Ed or Dave. Old-school OSGi developers are resisting to accept the wonderful world of PDE and are sticking to their old tools (ie. sticks and stones). Some Maven enthusiasts think that PDE places too many restrictions on their worfkflow.

Are we right or are they wrong? How can we come together to make Eclipse the best development environment for all plug-in/bundle/module/component programmers?

There is no better forum to address all these timely topics than an OSGi panel at EclipseCon 2007. So I submitted a proposal.

Our competition in the OSGi track is a panel about the "Future of OSGi". Give me a break. Sounds pretty boring. It will probably be a distinguished panel of OSGi-philes patting each other on the back and telling you that OSGi is "the best framework in the whole wide world, blah blah blah..." Who wants to see that? :)

Before we start talking about the "future of OSGi", let's talk about the present.

So if you like drama, if you like heated debates, vote for the fun submission. You will get your money's worth and more. People paid to see a fight on that stage, and I say let's give the people what they paid to see.

I am not going to reveal my most effective moves, but let's just say I used to be a huge 'Saved By the Bell' fan as a young teen.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Novel. I wasn't aware that I was a Maven enthusiast :-) I certainly wanted to raise a point that the PDE build is a little inflexible in terms of what lives where, and cited maven as an example, but it would apply to any build system where you need control of placement of resources.