Minutes of the 27 June 2006 Gathering of the Bay Area Friends of Eiffel
Attendance was good, especially given the very short notice given for the meeting. Again I apologize, I'd recently returned from Asia, and several of the people who wanted to attend were leaving the US at the end of that week.
Emmanuel Bouyer gave a very nice presentation on concurrent processing and Eiffel. Emmanuel began with a discussion of the limitations the current SCOOP specification. He explained in particular why SCOOP could not be used to implement Eiflex.
He then presented an overview of the Eiflex distributed object framework. The Eiflex framework provides a reliable platform-independent, multithreaded client/server architecture and is the basis of the Chicago Board of Trade's PRICE system.
Emmanuel then ran a "Dining Philosophers" demonstration that involved a GUI client and two server processes. One important aspect of the demo was the fault tolerance. You can kill the servers, but when they are restarted they will carry on where they left off, having preserved their state. Eiflex is highly also scalable. At CBOT, Windows clients connect to over one hundred Solaris servers, with each server running two hundred or more threads.
After Emmanuel's presentation, the gatherers congratulated Eric and Karine on their wedding, spent a little time surfing the Team Eiffel blog for interesting tidbits, and talked about what is going on with the various Open Source Eiffel projects around the world.
The next meeting will be held in September (too many people are traveling in August). I promise to give earlier advance notice.
Future meetings will be every other month, with a special effort to overlap with visits by Eric and Karine.
Emmanuel's presentations were based on those made by Gordon Jones (Emmanuel's partner at Eiflex) for a conference at York University in the UK.
http://www.artist-embedded.org/FP6/ARTIST2Events/Events/Cordie06/
More information about Eiflex can be found here:
http://www.eiflex.com/ The Team Eiffel blog is here:
http://teameiffel.blogspot.com/
A good starting point for more information about Eiffel is at Cetus Links:
http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_eiffel.html
Don't miss future announcements! You can subscribe to the BAFOEiffel mailing list,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BAFOEiffel/
by sending an email to BAFOEiffel-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
posted by greg c @ 23:14
