By Jonathan Crow

Continuing coverage from EclipseCon 2008. In the presentation from Cloudsmith given by their CEO, Mitch Sonies. He is going to be showing off some demos including Cloudsmith, OSGi and Android. Android is the open platform for mobile phones developed by the Open Handset Alliance and backed by Google. OSGi is a definition of standards for connecting smart consumer and small business appliances with commercial Internet services.

What is Cloudsmith - sharing components based on metadata, assembly instructions in the software, collaboration around configuration instead of bits, products are assembled by communities from shared assets.

Cloudsmith crawls well known repositories to grab metadata so that they can share that within the community. The community can be a public or private group. One of the first services they made available was one click install. You can send out a cloud link to a distro, users can click on that to install as many components as that distro consists of. Services are constructed with OSGi specifically for a shared world view with modularity, metadata and aggregation in mind.

They keep track of configuration as well as where the source code exists. Developers can bring the code down modify it and put it back where it belongs (hmm, how to get my daughter to do that). Typical usage scenario - adding developers to teams or projects, create assembly communities around code base, publishing aggregated distros, creating and maintaining private distros.

Ok, enough of the marketing stuff (said the marketing guy). Ah yes, he is getting to the demo. What are we going to see? XDrive, the AOL component, is mapped so that others can view and easily access. Then create two dev. distros, one for The Bug device (Dragonfly not sure exactly what it is but some sort of mobile device), and Android developer kit. He will take a picture on The Bug, store it on the XDrive, and send it to a mobile device. He asked us to help by crossing our fingers (ahh truth in demoing).

Now Lucas a developer from AOL. He joked about handing out free CDs. AOL is definitely pushing on the dev. community these days. Complexity of the project included time zones, his inability to type (he mistyped some stuff). He is using Cloudsmith to map the necessary objects. He talked about Eclipse Spaces and the ability to push the project to the web. So you don’t need your developers to jump out of their developer skin into a Wed developer. He is using Subversion (from Collabnet I mentioned in an earlier post). Now onto the Bug developer (still not not really sure exactly what this is but what I heard - mobile device running Linux on an Arm processor, online sharing sites, OSGi runtime called Concierge), he is taking a picture of us. Click click click. Bunch of really technical stuff - do something - run - binding to service. Getting the image from the camera going to XDrive over wifi.

A simple demonstration, with a lot of stuff behind it, but very powerful concept. Hmm, my BPM brain is pumping with all sotrs of possibilities. Integrating handsets and small appliance into the business process. Think of a doctor taking a picture that is automatically attached to a patient’s record. Ok, maybe not the best example, but you think up one;) no seriously how would you use it?

Stay tuned for more from EclipseCon 2008.

March 18th, 2008