[ecf-dev] My experience with ECF

[J Langley <jlangley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone - Scott asked me to send an e-mail about myself and what I have been doing with ECF.  I'll start with the ECF part.

My first run-in with ECF is blogged about here: http://www.langleystudios.net/software/eclipse/469

I am currently working as the Subject Matter Expert for HMI, Enterprise Layer, and Data Management for the Objective Simulation Framework (OSF).  You should be able to Google the project to find out a little about it.  For the past 3 months, I have been leading a team to break up our OSGi services and provide a capability to run some of them remotely.  There are some constraints that force us to do things a little different from the "normal" ECF programs.  Here are the main issues that we had to solve:

1. We can't count on DNS or Service Discovery.  We created a bundle that allows the user to enter the hostname or IP address of the host to connect.
2. We used EMF to model our OSGi services and the data being passed.  This data was not serializable out of the box.  This was the biggest, error-prone pain in the - well let's just say it was difficult.
3. Still haven't solved: We send a progress monitor to some of the longer running services to provide user updates.  We are still trying to find a way to create a "shared object" version of a progress monitor - we need progress back to the user and a possible call to cancel the operation to the server.
4. We needed a way to remotely browse a file system - made that possible with the SCP File Browse work.
5. The OSGi services have to work in either a remote or local form, without modifying the service.  We added a "companion bundle" for services needed remotely that re-register the service with ECF properties.

I believe that OSF is finished with the ECF migration, but I have a few ideas in the hopper that I will throw around a bit later.  Most deal with problems and protocols that I have faced in the Defense (or Defence if your Canadian or British) world.

Ok - so now a little about me

Professional Stuff:

I'm the Chief Technology Officer (Acting) for CohesionForce, Inc. (http://www.cohesionforce.com) where I have worked for 3 years.  CohesionForce offers me the opportunity work with Open Source projects and even provides funding for some updates.  I have been to EclipseCon North America for the last 3 years as well, and I even got a chance to present last year.

I am really good at Horizontal Integration of Technology.  For Eclipse, that means combining several existing Eclipse projects to provide a new capability.  My current personal side project is a combination of Eclipse EMF and Apache Avro - https://github.com/LangleyStudios/eclipse-avro

Community: 

I am the co-founder of a local Eclipse developers group that meets monthly.  We are currently working our way through an "Eclipse by Example" series.
http://hsveclipse.com

I am starting to get involved in the local web developers meetup as well.

I am also an avid musician (guitar and bass) and photographer.  You can find some of my work here: https://plus.google.com/+JLangley/photos

Thanks!
-J.