EclipseCon a success

It has been a whirlwind four weeks for ALF. First the extended trip to Asia and the UK and then to arrive back in the US in time for a full-court press at EclipseCon. Not only that but a surrogate ALF has been delivering the message in Poland to wild reviews. Before we get to that lets have a quick update on where we are.

RedMonk: Met with a very interesting and insightful analyst from RedMonk in London just over a week ago. We had lunch at a super restaurant in the City called Bread and Wine. The conversation was pretty wide ranging but was full of validation that ALF is an idea whose time has come. James Governor, the aforementioned interesting and insightful analyst, had been talking about this problem for the past few years and thought that his words were falling on stony ground. He was, as you can imagine, thrilled to hear that ALF was not only solving the problem but that the ecosystem was building nicely to make it happen quickly. He talks about this encounter in his PodCast available from RedMonk Radio: the bit on ALF is about 6 minutes into the pod cast. Makes good listening.

EclipseCon: This is the biggest Eclipse event of the year and this year was a bumper year with insiders telling me that Eclipse stopped recruiting attendees when registrations passed 1450. Serena were there in force with all the key ALF contributors and commiters talking about ALF. We spent the entire one and a half days of the Exhibition recruiting vendors and contributors to the ecosystem and putting gentle pressure on the big names (they know who they are) to support the project. What was really rewarding is the impact ALF made on the conference with several keynotes singling ALF out for a mention. "ALF is an important project for the future growth of the Eclipse ecosystem," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse Foundation. "ALF builds on the promise of the Eclipse platform for tools integration and provides an open source infrastructure for collaboration and interoperability between development tools across the entire lifecycle." Carl Zetie's comment (leading industry analyst with Forrester) even suggested that ALF was going to be the most interesting project this year and Corona (see later in the blog) the most interesting next year.

New ALF Supporters: Just before the show started we were able to report that 4 new vendors had signed up to help with the project and to ALF-enable their technologies. These vendors are IVIS, PlanView, ViewTier and Active-Endpoints whose BPEL-engine is such a critical part of the ALF POC Demo.

ALF POC Demo: EclipseCon was the first time that the ALF Proof of Concept Demo was shown to the community as a whole. We had a large group attending the demo and got some very interesting questions. Since the demo was published on the ALF part of the Eclipse web site we've been getting really good feedback about it (and through this blog too - for which many thanks) and the most consistent amongst the comments has been "how about showing some Open Source tools being orchestrated". So that is what we have done: in the new demo (which you can see on the ALF Site) we have included using Subversion and CVS as alternate source control systems. We have also extended the demo to include more information on how you would configure ALF and modify the Events and Service Flows. If you have any thoughts about the demo, as always please let us know.

ALF and Corona: The big news from Compuware about the creation of the Corona project caused a lot of interest because of the close alignment of ALF and Corona solving different parts of the tool interoperability problem. There were some in the press who tried to cause some controversy around this but what they didn't know is that Serena and Compuware have been in discussions for the past several months making sure the two technologies are completely complementary. "Eclipse is on the mark having separate ALM projects", said Carey Schwaber, an analyst at Forrester Research. "I think they do need to be two separate [projects]," she said. "There's clear synergies; there's no question." Whereas ALF is about coarsely grained workflow integration and how tools interact with one another, Corona is centered on how code assets interrelate, such as how source code on a mainframe could connect with code on a distributed platform, Schwaber said.

Poland: A close colleague called Pawel Pilarczyk recently was talking about ALF at a conference in Poland. He writes "Thank you for your input for my ALF presentation. I have just finished it. I had 100+ attendees and I met with a great applause: this is a Holy Grail everybody is waiting for! When I asked "who is using Eclipse" more that 50% raised their hands." Just before he spoke a well known vendor presented their latest toolset and mentioned how many (50) integrations they had. At the end of the Pawel's ALF presentation the audience members were asking the well know vendor "when are you going to ALF-enable your tool?"

Agile Journal: If you haven't seen the regular article in Agile Journal check it out. It is a really good publication with some interesting insights and looks like becoming a must-read for anyone trying rise above the Babel and get some sound guidance on what is really going on. I am working on the next edition which is entitled "Stretched to the limit" and talks about how, in this Flat World where space and time are no longer constraints, technology is the vital link that holds it all together. If you have thoughts and experiences I'd love to hear them and, with your permission, use them in my next article. Let me know directly if you have any by mailing me at kparker@serena.com

ALM Expo: This wonderful event is just around the corner. ALF is going to feature there in one of the keynote presentations. This unique event has the same format as a regular conference except everything happens in cyberspace including the exhibition floor. Its very cool! If you get a chance sign up and attend.

All for now

Kevin