The 2008 installment of the Rational Software Development Conference (RSDC) was held in Orlando the week of June 2. It was a great event, with >3200 attendees, interesting keynotes by the likes of Danny Sabbah (Rational GM), Grady Booch and William Shatner, detailed technical sessions in the various tracks and workshops, many customer and partner presentations, etc. The Enterprise Modernization track was very well attended, and we had several sessions on EGL, presented by IBMers, partners, customers and combinations.
The backdrop to this skit is that Chris Laffra, our EGL architect and team lead for Rich Web UI, teamed with Joe Pluta of Pluta Brothers Design to create the RSDC Conference Scheduler using the upcoming EGL Rich Web UI support. Chris did the UI and Joe did the backend, which was a combination of EGL and RPG running on IBM i. It was advertised to conference attendees beforehand so they could access it from their iPhones, create custom session schedules, etc. We also highlighted it with a handout during the lunch on Wednesday. All in all, it was a great way to get the word out to a wider audience about EGL, and to show off a really cool new application of the technology.
The energy around EGL at the conference was very encouraging. We gave away ~150 of the new Rational Business Developer with EGL books--ran out early in the week. We gave away shirts and worn them ourselves--"EGL - Simplify Innovation". And most importantly as mentioned above, there were several talks by IBMers, partners and customers about EGL technology and how they are leveraging EGL to solve their business problems. For example, I was pleased to be joined in my Enterprise Modernization Overview talk in the Executive Summit portion of the conference by Carl Tilkin-Franssens, CIO of KBC. Carl described how his organization is leveraging EGL to create a large pool of business developers, located is various geographies around the world, that can work on projects independent of deployment platform--IMS, WAS, Unix--which KBC requires due to different infrastructure in different locations around Europe.
Finally, I was really encouraged by the enthusiasm of the many EGL business partners that attended RSDC this year. It is with their help that we can grow the number of EGL success stories so that the EGL presence at RSDC 2009 will be even greater!
