nETC Workshop Report / Outcomes

Thanks to everyone who came, and especially to the presenters. Special thanks also to Bertrand Meyer for being available for the day, especially with his existing extremely busy schedule at TOOLS 2011 and ETHZ in general. Thanks also to those who travelled and put up with painful transport, especaially Roger, coming from Boston.

I think we made some real progress, but of course we need to capitalise by making something happen. This page documents the workshop itself, while the follow-up actions will be documented in appropriate places on the rest of this wiki. - thomas beale 29 June 2011.

Ongoing Discussions / Communications

For the moment, discussions will continue on the nETC mailing list, with this wiki being the place to record ideas, decisions and other content. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE if you are interested in actively contributing to the new Eiffel Technology Community which we hope to set up.

(There was an idea to continue discussions on LinkedIn , but the consensus post workshop was that the 'normal' old-style mailman list is probably more reliable. It is archived, so new users can see older discussions).

Key Conclusions

• We need a new Eiffel community to address the issues of: what prevents widespread Eiffel use today? What limits its visibility?
• The new community has to be primarily about delivering technology solutions to today's users - business and consumers, not an inward facing 'club'
• It will not be focussed on language evangelisation, but on the production of great apps, technology integration, efficient deployment tooling etc
• We must be able to answer the question: I have a great Eiffel library / component / tool... where do I put it?!

And, in particular, from Roger's presentation:

• for the young generation of developers, everything we thought was cool or amazing once, is just part of the background. Their base expectations are:
  • great development environment & tools - a la Eclipse
  • great version, issue and communications infrastructure, a la Github, Atlassian, Collabnet
  • connecting your code to any Database / GUI / web service / etc must be only keystrokes away

Concrete actions

• Start the discussion re: setting up a new foundation / .org versus a more minimal approach using e.g. EiffelRoom
• Compile a list of Public Relations (PR) channels to start using, and how to use them
• Work on the 20 second 'Elevator Pitch'
• Use the workshop brainstorming groups output to crystallise a priority list of key issues / areas to address in a new community environment

Presentations

• Introduction - Thomas Beale
• Keynote - Roger Osmond
• .Net & 21st C Eiffel - Peter Lubke
• Modelling stack and archetypes - Thomas Beale
• Connecting Eiffel - ZeroMQ and Protocol Buffers - Seref Arikan
• Eiffel_Design_Feast_2011.pdf - Manu Stapf

Brainstorming Reports

We had 4 brainstorming groups, under the following themes. Each group reports its thoughts in the linked pages.

• WorkshopTechnologyTheme
• WorkishopDeploymentTheme
• WorkshopCommunityTheme
• WorkshopTransitionTheme