First off, thanks to everyone that came out to the EGL Conference last week in Wiesbaden, Germany. What a great event it was! Stef, the self-titled Czar of the conference, wrote a nice summary,
check it out. Here are some of the main things I picked up on and/or observed and/or thought about as I was driving 200 km/h to Frankfurt last Friday night ...
Once you're hooked, there's no going back
For me, it's always energizing to be around people that "get it", and there was no shortage of these people at the event. Although I've said it before, it's worth saying again: once a person tries EGL with an open mind and puts in a little effort, they are hooked and never look back. As programmers/technologists, we should be willing to give anything a try (at least once) - and, by anything, I mean other languages and technologies, of course. I just don't see enough of this today, especially in "established" IT communities. On a related note: I don't know how many times I've heard: "oh, yah, we tried EGL like 3 or 4 years ago and didn't like it". I can almost understand this (to a certain extend), but at the same time: stuff changes and gets better; especially EGL. Just look how far EGL has come in 3 years, and imagine where it'll be in another 3 years! And imagine where EGL will be when I'm gray and balding (many, many years from now) ...
Open, open, open
We officially launched the EGL open project in 2010, and, man, what a journey it has been. EGL was designed for extensibility - i.e. to be able to support new languages, platforms, and frameworks, but this was largely impossible for anyone (but IBM) before. With open, the impossible will soon be possible. The demo Tim did around the
Android Java generator perfectly shows the true power of EGL to be the most flexible, extensible, and strategically-smart language the world has ever seen (OK, that may be pushing it ... but maybe not). I can't wait to see all the ways people extend EGL and all the places EGL generated code will soon be running.
As a side note: if there was ever any doubt as to the brain-power behind the EGL technology, those doubts were obliterated as Tim (Wilson) described how EGL is put together and how the open project is going to make it possible to extend our generator, create new generators, or builds tools that make the lives of developers better. Sleep tight at night knowing we have some really bright people working on this stuff.
EGL does that?
I would say the highlight of the day was the brilliant demo by Aaron Allsbrook (from our partner ClearBlade). The demo showed how EGL can be used to quickly develop a powerful web application that accesses data from a third-party service, in this case a service provided by Rational Team Concert for accessing work item data. The demo did a great job of highlighting some of the great enhancements in version 8 - from the wizard that creates EGL records from XML or JSON to the improvements in the visual editor for dragging-and-dropping a record to create a UI form. This demo really shows the versatility of EGL --- what other technology can be used for batch programs on System z, but also for building modern web 2.0 style mashups? Answer: no other technology.
Big thanks
Major thanks to our partner sponsors who invested a lot of time and effort planning the event. Paul, Maurice, Ramona, Eric, Aaron, Jens, Maria, Heidi, Elvin, Stef, and Theresa - thank you all.
Already looking forward to EGL Con 2012 ...