[stellation-res] Hello

[Jim Wright - IBM Research <jwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

My name is Jim Wright and I'm part of the Stellation project team at IBM
research. I'm responsible for the GUI and Eclipse-specific portions of
Stellation, and am also the Windows maven in the group (although I spend
more time on Linux these days).  I joined the Stellation team about a year
ago, after almost ten years in the IBM Computer Music Center.  My research
interests involve authoring systems, HCI and fine-grained content
representations; in a sense, I've just switched focus from one type of
content (music) to another (source code).

I'm really looking forward to helping Stellation evolve as an open-source
project.  In the near term, my focus will be on plugins for using Stellation
as a "better CVS" - more transparent, flexible and forgiving than CVS, and
well integrated with the Eclipse platform.  While the basic features are
working now, there's a lot more to do before the plugins provide reasonable
support for day-to-day development - it's definitely a work in progress.
(I'll post another note soon with more details on the current state of the
plugins, and should have a rough draft of the Stellation Plugin User's Guide
up on the website soon -- apologies for not having it ready now.)

As things move on, I'll be focusing more on Eclipse facilities for
effectively working with fine-grained software artifacts.  This will include
areas like fragment-based source versioning and management, but the most
interesting work will probably be Eclipse support for dynamic program
organization and what we call "virtual source files" (e.g. slicing and
dicing small fragments of source code to show only the parts relevant to a
given task, without changing how the code is decomposed into actual source
files).  VSF editing and VSF generation are both key areas -- we'll need
good editor support for working with these dynamically-generated collections
of  source fragments as if they were files, but we'll also need effective
tools for locating and organizing interesting fragments and generating (and
regenerating) the corresponding VSFs.

You can find out more about these ideas in the Publications section of our
website, which I've just put together (from the Stellation home page,
select the Documents link, then Publications).

It's going to be a lot of fun!

Regards,

Jim
--
Jim Wright, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
*** http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work Email: jwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ------- Personal Email: 
jim.wright@xxxxxxx