Free Java Summit

There’s been planning internally at Red Hat for a while to host a
Free Java Summit. This is a reality now, it will be happening
November 18 and 19 in Boston. The agenda is still in a state of flux,
but I gather one of the main focuses will be promoting better
cooperation, unity, and information sharing in the free java space.

The summit is invitation-only, but I was told that community types
are welcome — so if you are a free java hacker or fellow traveler,
and you want to come, let me know and I will pass the information to
the list-keepers. I probably can’t say much about the attendee list
at the moment, but it will be a good cross-section of academia,
industry, and the free software community.

Eclipse Plugins

Today Red
Hat released
a couple new Eclipse plugins — one for RPM hacking
and one for using OProfile from inside Eclipse. This is some cool
stuff.

Movie Editing

From time to time, Anthony and I work on a
movie editor. It is between names at the moment, so no nice tag line,
but we do have a
first screenshot
(looks like I broke thumbnail generation in this
one, bleah).

The first thing you’ll notice is that it is an Eclipse plugin.
While almost everyone I’ve talked to agrees that this is a crazy idea,
to me it makes a lot of sense, as Eclipse provides a lot of nice
facilities. We get to write in a high level language, and Eclipse
provides a lot of core support for writing applications — the kind of
things I had hoped, back in the day, that libgnomeui would provide.

It seems to me that editing a movie isn’t too different from
developing a program, and Eclipse makes it very easy for us to exploit
this. E.g., we already have CVS integration, and media files, which
you probably wouldn’t store in CVS, are easily handled as linked
resources. As another example, if you wrote an effects plugin, you
could easily have your movie project depend on the plugin, so that a
complete rebuild would first build the effect, then the movie would
apply it. This could all be done inside Eclipse — changes to the
effect would cause the movie to be re-rendered.

More on the state of this, and our plans, and justifications for
and benefits of using Eclipse, later. If you’ve got a good idea for a
name, that isn’t cutesy, send it my way :-). Maybe I’ll also post a
bit about our long search for an appropriate media framework — or
maybe I can get Anthony to write about that.

Be the first to leave a comment. Don’t be shy.

Join the Discussion

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.