Experiences porting a suite of massive Swing apps to Eclipse 4

After more than 10 years of developing its own proprietary application platform, Halliburton's Landmark Software and Services made the decision to switch to the Eclipse RCP and OSGi platform. The switch came at an interesting time as Eclipse Platform 3.x gives way to Eclipse 4. This change caused some initial uncertainty in our technical direction. But, we were fortunate in our timing as our effort has been simplified by new features in the Eclipse 4 platform.

In this talk, we will highlight some of the issues we faced and how we resolved them. We'll cover some of the technical challenges and will highlight some of the useful features from Eclipse 4 and OSGi that greatly simplified — and hampered — our migration. With several hundred developers, many coming from non-computer science backgrounds, we knew we had a significant retraining exercise. We'll also cover some of the significant changes that were required elsewhere within the organization, such as Legal with the implications of EPL and committing back, HR and recruiting for new skills, and release management.

Slides: 

EclipseCon2013_LandmarkSwingToE4.pdf