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Erich Gamma gave a talk on Eclipse, which is a variation on the theme he’s been doing for some time now on various conferences. The main difference to the previous years is the part about Jazz.

One interesting thing I didn’t know was that Eclipse now includes API tools that allow to annotate APIs with version information and fine-grained access control and then make Eclipse IDE check these for you.

So WTF is Jazz? Explanation starts with great clouds of fog: “integration”, “community” and even “Eclipse experience”. Scary diagrams with a lot of arrows. Starts sounding like Twitter on steroids — you can follow events or channels, events are produced from both web and Eclipse plugins. You can also track basic statistics like defect progress. Doubt you can get updates to IM or SMS, though :)

I wonder if you could actually build something much simpler on top of Twitter? Like just produce artificial users you can follow and stay up-to-date on team happenings. Jazz sounds like something overcomplicated for a simpleton like me.

OK, there’s also some data mining you won’t get with such a simple setup. The tag cloud is of course present, as are a lot of progress bars and there is integration for builds and automatic tests. Also does planning and reflection, though I still think you can do a lot simpler (read: whiteboard!) with a smaller or non-distributed team.

In the end Jazz might be very cool, but it’s a complex tool and you need to really get in to it to understand whether it’s worth the hassle. It also looks like it can impose a lot of ceremony on your process, though it may be possible to use just a fraction of the features Erich showed.

Some misquotes:

• “Frameworks are like exhibitionism with a sea of classes” — on implicit dependencies among classes
• “There are four layers of preference mechanisms in Eclipse” — when commenting on API evolution
• “If it hasn’t shipped it doesn’t exist” — referring to the secrecy surrounding Eclipse before it went Open Source.
• “My mother can see the bugs I have?” — commenting on developer reaction to going Open Source.
• “Milestones are like a soap opera” — about people looking at New and Noteworthy