Showcase: Eclipse in the Oil and Gas Industry

We used BIRT for our spectral analysis editor. It made for a fast development cycle but the business oriented charting isn't up to plotting thousands of data points. The guys working on BIRT have been very responsive to our requests but it's not a high performance scientific charting API. Work on a replacement starts in 2008. We'll still use BIRT for our management related reports.

The seismic data keeps its own processing history. It's an audit trail of how the raw seismic field data was processed into a final client ready dataset. It can take hundreds of processing steps and months of CPU time to generate one seismic dataset. The history alone for a single file can reach 100 gigabytes. Being able to create our own custom IDocument saves us from loading the whole file into memory.

Quality control of the seismic data is another big challenge. The volume of data makes it impossible for a human to inspect all of the project data.

Managing the volume of files has been in nightmare in the past. I've been impressed with how well the resources plugin combined with the Common Navigator Framework has been able to keep up with our demands.

The Eclipse User Assistance API has been used heavily. We have offices all around the world so we have to provide easy access to good quality help documents. We are using Camtasia to create built in videos. I don't want to get a call from our users in Libya at two in the morning.

We've written a smart job deck editor that has all of the features of the Java editor but it works with our proprietary processing language called kismet. Our seismic processors are a bit like software programmers. They write job decks that tell our seismic processing system how to manipulate the seismic data.

Our clients send data in a bewildering array of data formats. Using our standard database editor has reduced the confusion experienced by our users. As new formats appear we create a new translator and plug it into the IPE. All of our plotting plugins can then take advantage of the new data.