Creating a new Eiffel Technology Community (nETC)

News

28 August - Status of nETC mailinglist

As per today, the status of the discussions on the mailinglist is collected and put on a seperate page. Everybody is invited to add information which can be of importance.

27 June - nETC Workshop

The workshop was well attended (around 23), with 4 presenters, and 4 brainstorming sessions. Roger Osmond's keynote was a delight and right to the point. See the workshop report page for presentations and outcomes.

Introduction

This site is for discussions and ideas to do with creating a 'new Eiffel technology community' (nETC for short). The basic premise is: Eiffel is probably the best object-oriented language available today, yet it has low uptake. My contention is that this is because of a major change in the IT world: software developers no longer demand a good language (in fact, many don't seem to know or care too much about language quality), nor even a 'great IDE', but rather a powerful 'technology stack' from which they can build and deploy big systems. Well known examples include LAMP, JBoss, Python/Zope, or Ruby-on-Rails. Software developers don't seem to mind moving to new languages: Ruby has grown quickly over the last few years for example, and Scala may be taking off. I believe there is no reason why Eiffel cannot do the same.

The idea of a 'new Eiffel community' is therefore to do with establishing a community structure around an Eiffel technology stack. Why? Because it means developers can then write new software in one of the world's most powerful languages, while still being able to build large systems that incorporate other components such as databases and app servers.

To initially examine the concept, there was a day-long workshop at the TOOLS conference in Zurich on Monday 27 June, 2011. In preparation for that, this wiki was set up (thanks to ETHZ Chair of Software Engineering), an initial structure has been created and some initial material has been put on it, but the idea is to get ideas coming from everywhere. There is also a mailing list (and the related messages archive).

Who is this for?

Short answer: anyone who would like to see an Eiffel-based technology framework in which large scale applications and systems can be built and deployed. More specifically:

• software developers who would like to use Eiffel in a more powerful framework
• software developers who know Eclipse, Ruby-on-Rails and other similar technologies, and would like to create something similar based on Eiffel
• open source and social coding experts who would like help build something new and exciting
• companies and universities who would like to play a part, including contributing resources

Getting started

As a starting point, please read the InitialAnalysis of the challenge, and the results of the first nETC workshop on June 27 at ETH Zurich. Please at least skim this because it gives us at least some language in which to talk about the challenge.

Getting involved:

• Step #1: please subscribe to the mailing list
• Step #2: we build up the structure and content of this wiki;
• Step #3: publicise the nETC idea (see below);
• Step #4+: start to do the work...

Publicity for nETC

If you are interested in the nETC idea, please consider how you can publicise it. If you do publicise it somewhere, please update the list below so that we can track where announcements have been made.

• Eiffel Software users yahoo group (19 Feb 2011)
• other...

Looking for information on nETC members? Get to know each other on LinkedIn

Structure of this wiki

The main content of this wiki is currently structured according to the following scheme:

• Problem analysis: descriptions of why Eiffel isn't still a mainstream language today:
  • T. Beale's initial analysis from FOSE 2010.
• the current state: a description of what already exists in the Eiffel world in terms of:
  • technology, libraries, components, educational material etc;
  • people, companies, universities using Eiffel, anything else;
• Industry and social trends:
  • Where is technology going - what does programming look like in the future?
  • social and political trends - the open source movement, etc
• the goal state: a description of what we are aiming for:
  • domain verticals - does it make sense to address a particular domain area, e.g. health, gaming, control systems etc?
  • technologically - tools, components, frameworks;
  • socially / organisationally.
• Evolution strategy: how to get there, what steps are needed, and who does them

Hopefully it is obvious that as this is a wiki, anyone who has better ideas for arranging information should contribute directly. We have versioning to save us from mistakes...

Page index

• problem analysis ( Thomas Beale and Howard Thomson )
• current state
• industry and social trends
• goal state
• evolution strategy

• mailing list and archive

• TOOLS 2011 nETC workshop and results ( Brainstorming: Technology / Deployment / Community / Transition )

• nETC members

Background

By way of introduction, my name is Thomas Beale, and I have been using Eiffel since about 1990 (it was born in 1985). I am a professional software engineer and architect, currently working in e-health systems and standards. I have been observing the progress of Eiffel the language for 2 decades, and appreciating its power and economy to the point where I can't imagine having to program in certain other well-known languages. And yet, far weaker languages have gained far bigger marketshare. Reflecting on the state of Eiffel at 2010 Future of Software Engineering conference in Zurich, Nov 2010, it occurred to me that we should do something about creating a modern community and technology stack for Eiffel. It is too good not to be in mainstream use.

Despite the above, my main qualification for this activity is probably not to do with using Eiffel for many years, but having been heavily involved in the creation of the openEHR.org community (EHR = Electronic Health Record). Over the last 10 years I have learned a lot about the challenge of building a community, open source, obtaining funding, becoming sustainable, governance, and many other issues.

My intention here is to try to facilitate things for a while, started with the TOOLS workshop day, and as preparation, helping this wiki and the mailing list to function. If we succeed, it will be the younger generation who actually builds the community and makes it work... I will only be too happy to help other, better qualified people take over.

If you want to know more about me, see: my blog, ADL Workbench, an (open source) Eiffel application of which I am the primary author; my presentation at the FOSE conference, which presages the community theme on this site.