In the spirit of transparency and openness, the submission process for EclipseCon 2009 conference is very refreshing. As the main site says

The selection is done transparently and in the open. Specifically, all submissions are made through our submission system. Everyone in the community (including you) is invited to review the submissions, ask for more information, provide comments and critiques – just as everyone in community is invited and encouraged to do for Eclipse bugs and features.

I have just submitted a proposal to talk about our experiences in developing a visual designer for form-based applications, built on top of rich Eclipse tools such as the core platform itself, as well as JDT, EMF, GEF, VE and JEM. The proposal is called “On The Shoulders of Giants: Harnessing the Power of Eclipse Enterprise Ecosystem“, and you are more than welcome to leave comments on the entry. Here is the abstract:

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Code reuse in large projects is not just a trendy buzzword. If you can build upon solid, evolving and well tested foundations that are developed and maintained by committed teams, you have much less code to test, integrate and support. The Eclipse Ecosystem is a prime example of an extremely rich foundation for building enterprise grade applications, and this talk is going to show the diverse, yet interoperable technologies that allow businesses to concentrate on their specific requirements without reinventing the plumbing layers.

A part of a larger client-facing offering, Amdocs Smart Client Designer is an advanced visual designer that allows seamless collaboration between designers and developers in creating complex business form-based applications for Support Call Centers in the telecommunication industry. Harnessing the power of such technologies as JDT, GEF, EMF, JEM and VE has allowed us to dramatically reduce the effort to build the basic blocks of the tool (such as persistence, code generation and java syntax tree manipulations). In addition, core platform features such as task and job managers, builders, natures, markers and many more are enabling user-centric asynchronous business flows in a clean, simple and maintainable way.

Building on top of a vibrant and evolving ecosystem has been a pleasant experience, further strengthened by a recent migration to Java 6, Eclipse 3.4 and the latest version of the dependent plugins. In addition, we are going to talk about the “Eclipse way” of designing the flows, where the existing core features guide the design process to facilitate familiar flows and simpler implementation.

If you are developing a large Eclipse-based offering, or considering Eclipse as the vehicle for your next enterprise-grade tool, come to our session to hear about our experiences in this area.