TOOLS Workshop Zurich 27 June 2011

Title: Creating the new Eiffel Technology Community

WORKSHOP PRESENTATIONS, BRAINSTORMING REPORTS - please update!

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Who will be at the workshop? Get to know each other here.

Overview: technology communities are big business today. System builders in both commercial and other organisations routinely build and deploy large systems using components from an integrated technology 'stack', such as LAMP, JBoss, Python/Zope, or Ruby-on-Rails, or commercial platforms such as Microsoft. Similarly, for builders of client side tools Eclipse is popular. The common factor is not open source, but ease of integration of components to build large enterprise tools or systems: it's quicker than putting it together by hand.

So far, Eiffel has not figured in this revolution, but the time is ripe. The technology components are known, and most of the integration strategies have been tried and tested. And Eiffel has a massive advantage over the mainstream production languages: its semantic power today is light years ahead. While no-one has been watching, over the last 10 years Eiffel was open sourced and dozens of powerful features have been added to the language and tools, to make it the most powerful object technology available. This matters, because as soon as it comes to having to actually write code, particularly any detailed business or computational logic, Eiffel is a far better performer than its competitors.

This workshop is designed to get both existing Eiffel experts, and particularly newcomers from industry and academia together to design a business-friendly, properly resourced New Eiffel Technology Community. It will enable today's developers to quickly and easily deploy Eiffel in both large multi-tier systems and also sophisticated user tools and applications in the manner of Eclipse. It will also revolutionise the integration and dissemination of existing Eiffel libraries. The challenge will be discussed under the broad themes:

1. the core: language
2. IDE / tooling
3. Frameworks & integration
4. Deployment: packaging & customer delivery & upgrade capabilities
5. The social dimension

Goals

The main outcomes of the workshop would be ideas, proposals and potentially some key decisions on how to set up and progress the new Eiffel technology community.

Structure

The workshop is 1 day long, and is structured as follows:

• Morning:
  • --- 09:00 ---
  • 10 mins: introduction - Thomas Beale
  • 45 mins: keynote - Roger Osmond
  • 10 mins: .NET, mono and Eiffel: the next level - Peter Lubke
  • 10 mins: Archetypes & multi-level modelling - Thomas Beale
  • 10 mins: Web programming event - Manu Stapf
  • --- 10:30 - coffee - 11:00 ---
  • 2 hours: facilitated brain-storming in groups to generate proposals for action under a set of key headings
• --- 1300 - lunch ---
• Aftenoon:
  • --- 14:30 ---
  • 60 mins: facilitated presentation and discussion of brainstorming outcomes leading to a consolidated set of proposals and issues
  • --- 15:30 - coffee - 16:00 ---
  • 1 hour+: facilitated group discussion: develop a programme of steps for community launch.
  • 17:30: close

Preparation

A wiki site and discussion list will be available some months ahead of the workshop, and both intending participants and other interested individuals are encouraged to help build up initial material and ideas ahead of the workshop.

Facilitator: Thomas Beale, CTO Ocean Informatics, chair ARB, openEHR Foundation, BCS CITP.