Quite a number of my colleagues at itemis have been busy preparing for this conference in the past few weeks. Besides working hard to hit the Eclipse Release Train milestone for Indigo on June 22nd, the Xtext team brushed up their hands-on sessions "Xtext Take I: Creating Code Generators with Xtend2" and "Xtext Take II: Crafting Domain Specific Languages with Xtext and Xbase". If you've been using Xtext, you're well aware of the power you have at your disposal with this tool. Xbase and Xtend2, however, take this experience to a whole new level. So make sure to mark your calendar for these two sessions!

But not only the Xtext team will share their expertise at CG2011 - Markus and Karsten will be also be in town to give hands-on tutorials and report from their experience:

• Type Systems for DSLs (Markus Völter)
• Graphiti + Xtext: mixing graphical and textual DSLs for sprayers/designers (Karsten Thoms / Bernhard Merkle)
• Introduction to JetBrains Meta Programming System (MPS) (Markus Völter)

The finale of the conference will be a panel discussion hosted by Markus on the topic of "Models, DSLs, Transformations: The Next 5 years" - this should be a very interesting and lively discussion!

Heiko and I will present "Cross-Platform Mobile Development with DSLs" - a fast-paced and fun mixture of slides, live coding (or modeling, if you will), videos and audience interaction. Yes, that's right - the audience will be part of the show. Make sure to bring your web-enabled mobile phone and get the chance to win a price!

To keep track of the conference program(me), we at itemis mobile have been busy to create a conference planner for your iOS and Android powered mobile phones. Here are the download links:

• Apple App Store: Code Generation 2011
• Android Market Place: Code Generation 2011

Code Generation 2011 Apps for iPhone and Android

If you like the apps, please use the feedback feature of the respective store. Got comments or suggestions for improvement? Drop us a note or track us down at the conference (best chance to see us: come to our talk ).

All apps allow you to browse the program, select your favorite talks and get to know the speakers (with headshots so you recognise them in the hallways). We also have included maps of the convention center as well as Santa Clara.

For a first glimpse, watch our video:

As of today, both iPhone and Android users can download the apps from the Apple App Store respectively the Android Marketplace. Here are the links:

1. EclipseCon 2011 iPhone App
2. EclipseCon 2011 Android App

If you don't own an iPhone or Android, you can always use the HTML-only version of the conference program available at http://bit.ly/econ2011html.

The iPad and BlackBerry apps will be available soon, so stay tuned!

By the way, if you run a conference and are interested in having an app like this, get in touch with us.

We had a nice lineup of four speakers - unfortunately not all of them were able to attend due to a cold, but we were lucky enough to find one additional speaker - thanks Jan!

After a casual meet-and-greet with Fritz Kola and Pretzels, Dalibor Topic opened the official part of the evening with an overview of what's coming up in JDK7 and JDK8. Here's a list of things that sound quite interesting:

• Support for dynamically-typed languages (InvokeDynamic) (project page)
• Small language enhancements (Project Coin) (project page)
• An even newer NIO (project page)

The good news of the day of course was a press release announcing OpenJDK for Mac OSX. Nevertheless, Dalibor demoed a freshly built OpenJDK 7 BSD port on his MacBook.

After a short break, it was Ralf Sternberg's turn to give an overview of RAP and explain what Single Sourcing is. With the help of RAP, it is rather easy to bring Eclipse RCP applications to the web. Of course, you'll have to pay attention to a few things, as Ralf pointed out: usually, RCP applications are single-user apps, whereas web applications are inherently multi-user enabled. Fortunately, RAP comes with a few utilities that cater for this fact.

One thing I was delighted to learn: not only do RAP applications run on the iPad, but also do they support drawing using the SWT API, as you can see in the following video:

In the last sessions, Xtext committer Jan Köhnlein showed us some of the things coming up in Xtext 2.0. Being text-addicted, Jan refrained from using slides and used the IDE instead to deliver his talk:

Jan showed us how Xbase (no, not xBase) can be used to develop DSLs (and even GPLs) that not only describe structural features but also behavior. He also demoed Xdoc, a newly invented documentation language, and the fancy new Xtext syntax view (featuring railroad diagrams).

After the demoes, we had some time for chats and impromptu hack sessions. Given the event took place in a book store (many thanks to Lehmanns for having us!), you could also browse and buy books.

Thanks to the fact we only had about 40 attendees, there were plenty of chances for networking which people really seemed to enjoy.

I'd like to thank everybody who attended the DemoCamp or gave a demo! Follow me on twitter to be informed ahead of time for the next DemoCamp!

I think the program committee have done a great job at putting together an exciting conference program with lots of technical sessions, interactive tutorials and inspiring keynotes.

As a special treat for smart phone users, we're offering a conference schedule app for iPhone, Android and all other smart phones that come with a browser. Besides reviewing the conference schedule and getting to know the speakers you can use the apps to create your very own personal conference schedule. Usually, conference attendees will use the printed conference program to mark their favorite talks - and then leave their personalized copy of the program in their hotel room or elsewhere in the conference halls!

This will probably not happen with the smart phone app, although I can recall somebody lost their iPhone at this year's EclipseCon...

Without further ado, here's a preview of the iPhone app in action:

You can download the iPhone app from the App Store. It is available world-wide and we already have a few downloads from Singapore, Korea and India! For your convenience, here's the link to the app.

We also prepared a version for Android users. Here's how it will look like on your Android device:

Head over to the Android Marketplace and search for "eclipse summit", or use your barcode scanner:

The mobile web app will be available from the Wifi landing page at the conference venue is available via the following URL: http://bit.ly/ese_app_mobile2/.

Rumor has it even BlackBerry users will get a native app. Ekke has created a native app for BlackBerry.

Using these applications, you'll be able to put together your Eclipse Summit Europe 2010 in no time. Enjoy!

The iPhone, Android and mobile web apps have been built by a dedicated team of software engineers at itemis I have the pleasure to work with. If you want to learn how we build applications like these, attend our sessions:

• Tuesday, 14:00 - Mobile Development Symposium
• Thursday 10:30 - Models To Go: How We Built a DSL for Mobile Apps With Tools From the Eclipse

Also, be sure to drop by the new website for our mobile business: http://mobile.itemis.com and follow us on Twitter: @itemismobile.

Enjoy the your conference!

Here's the detailed program:

• 18:00 - 18:40 Welcome / Short films
• 18:45 - 19:15 Lars Vogel, Developing with e4
• 19:20 - 19:50 Sebastian Zarnekow, Xtext - A Language Development Framework, Live demo of new and noteworthy features in Xtext
• 19:50 - 20:20 Break + Surprise
• 20:20 - 20:35 Jürgen Becker, UI with style - a new SWT platform that is based on Qt
• 20:40 - 21:10 Ralf Ebert, Introduction to distributed version control with Git
• 21:15 - 21:45 Heiko Behrens, Build your own iPhone app within minutes - thanks to Eclipse
• 21:45 - open end Closing remarks / Frosty beverages

The DemoCamp will take place in the MAGAZIN Cinema in Hamburg (directions) and yes, we will show some short films at the beginning of the camp for your entertainment.

Martin Lippert and I are happy to be able to present a great lineup of speakers and demos, so do yourself a favor and join us this Friday from 18:00 (6pm).

As always, the event if free of charge thanks to the generous support of it-agile, itemis and the Eclipse Foundation.

Looking forward to seeing you on Friday!

Right after my talk, Heiko showed how Xtext and Xpand can be used to generate native iPhone applications - something that he and I are currently working on as a part of our day-to-day job at itemis. Heiko's slides also are available on Slideshare.

Something which - originally - wasn't related to code generation or iPhones at all was the e4 Mars Rover Challenge. In this challenge, the goal was to control a Mars rover (built with LEGO Mindstorms) in a Mars-like environment by using an Eclipse e4 based client and a set of server components hosted on Amazon EC2. In order to win, you either needed to score the highest score or improve the Eclipse e4 client. It was left to the developer's fantasy how to improve the client. In order to score the most points, you needed to drive the rover to certain places in the Mars arena and present one of two "tools" highlighted on the rover - see the rules of the challenge.

On the first day, I played some rounds with the basic e4 client (you needed to install it on your local machine) and scored quite OK. In the evening, after I dropped off my laptop in my room, it occurred to me that without my computer, I wouldn't be able to take the challenge that evening. "Wouldn't it be awesome to use my iPhone to control the Mars Rover", I thought? Compared to a laptop, an iPhone is a very small device so you can take it with you where ever you go. Also, as the Mars Rover Challenge was setup to be a completely distributed system, with the command server being hosted "in the cloud", delivering an image of the Mars arena to the clients, I should be able to connect to the rover from anywhere on the world (as long as I have access to the internet).

When I mentioned my thinking to Heiko, he was equally thrilled as I was and we immediately set out to take the new challenge of writing an iPhone client for the Mars Rover.

We discussed quite a few interaction patterns we wanted to try out:

1. Using buttons (much like the cursor pad on a keyboard) to "joystick" the rover
2. Using a touch interface to control the rover: use pinching to rotate the rover and pointing to make it move in a certain direction
3. Using the accelerometer to be able to control the Rover by tilting the iPhone

Heiko took on the job of evaluating the human interaction interface, whereas I was busy implementing the interface between the iPhone app and the command server backend. The command server of the Mars Rover is implemented as a RESTful webservice, so I could use plain HTTP calls to send commands to the server and to retrieve telemetry and imagery data. At first, I used blocking calls and later replaced them with asynchronous calls - sometingh which I'll liekly blog about the next days, so stay tuned. In order to test my code, I implemented a very simple button-based UI. With this UI, I was able to score 2702 points - not too bad!

After just two nights of development time (we wanted to attend the sessions and also had to man the itemis booth), we finally had a slick iPhone app that was able to control the Mars Rover by using the accelerometer. In the nght just before we had to hand in our submission, we shot a video of us driving the Rover. You can watch this video on the iPhone Mars Rover website.

Here is a little diagram outlining the controls of the application:

We knew right from the start that we wouldn't be able to match the competition criteria (the contest rules clearly state that the client has to be Eclipse e4-based in order to qualify). However, we still were eager to work on this project, as it fit very well with our current obsession with all things iPhones.

While it certainly is a fun idea to use an iPhone app to control a LEGO Mindstorms robot, we would not recommend using this approach for controlling real robots - especially if they're some 55 million km away on Mars! Signal latency from Mars to Earth is said to be around 15 to 20 minutes, which suggests to use a move-oriented approach to drive the rover.

Nevertheless it has been an exciting and fun project for Heiko and me. By the way, we're not only developing iPhone apps for fun, but also for profit: we're spearheading the brand-new mobile development division of itemis, so I'm pretty sure we will blog about mobile technology soon.

The program was packed with interesting talks and we were lucky to be able to present some very well known speakers:

1. Tom Schindl: E4 - A short overview
2. Jan Köhnlein: Combining graphics and text in model editors
3. Jochen Krause: RAP
4. Nils Hartmann, Gerd Wütherich: Fifty ways to build your bundle...
5. ekke (Ekkehard Gentz):redView - dynamic views for business applications

If you were not lucky enough to attend the DemoCamp, here is a short summary of the sessions:

e4 - modeling meets runtime (Jochen Krause on behalf of Tom Schindl)

Tom Schindl couldn't attend the DemoCamp due to heavy snow in Innsbruck (the airport was short of planes to fly out, actually). After a short vcon with Tom, Jochen Krause held the e4 demo on Tom's behalf.

e4 has three principal aims:

1. simplifying the Eclipse programming model
2. enabling the platform for use on emerging web-based runtime technologies
3. and broadening participation in development of the platform

One of the measures to make programming Eclipse easier is to define a list of core services and make sure they have a really decent API. This list of services is called "The 20 Things" (see the Eclipse wiki for more information).

You might have heard that EMF is playing an important role in e4 and I think it is one of the most amazing things about e4 that the entire workbench is modeled, of course using EMF. Actually, you can change the workbench at runtime by just modifying the underlying model at runtime. I think it is very exciting to see modeling and runtime technologies converge in this project.

e4 also makes massive use of dependency injection, which allows for a flat object model (Instead of providing a subclass for every special feature, you can just inject other classes providing that particular feature). We had a discussion about dependency injection. Jochen showed that several methods in e4 use String-based dependency injection, which of course leads to several problems. Sven pointed out that this is not a DI problem per se and suggested to use interfaces to alleviate the situation.

Heiko raised the question of whether we should have a dedicated session on dependency injection at one of the next democamps:

Jochen continued his session, explaining how the e4 UI is being rendered by a presentation engine which can be configured using various renderers, each one providing an individual look and feel.

e4 is the future of Eclipse, and Jochen concluded his talk by pointing out that in order to ensure e4 has a sustainable future, companies and individuals should participate in the development of e4. This can be done by:

• Playing around with e4 and providing feedback
• Participating in the development process (see the e4 project homepage for more info)
• Paying existing committers (see Tom's blog posting to learn how to buy one and get one free)

More info on e4 can be found on the Eclipse wiki.

After the talk, we had a short break to set up the next presenter, enjoy some refreshments and, of course, socialize:

Combining graphics and text in model editors (Jan Köhnlein)

After the break, Jan Köhnlein took stage and told the audience that graphics and text and no different, but really are just two views on the same thing:

Jan pointed out that both text and graphics have their relative virtues:

Text...

• provides a detailed view on things
• can have a very formal syntax
• can be typed using standard text editors
• can be managed using standard versioning mechanisms (merge / diff)
• can be typed fast

Graphical representations on the other hand...

• provides high-level views and a good overview
• suggests non-formalism
• requires custom editors for your graphical notation (i.e., you need to write them)
• has no good support for merging / diffing
• requires the user to use a mouse a lot, and thus is slower than a text editor

Apparently, both have advantages, so why not use both?

In the following 5 minutes, Jan gave an ultra-quick introduction in how Xtext (as a representative of a textual modeling toolkit) and GMF (as a representative for a graphical modeling toolkit) work. The bottom line is both use Ecore metamodels, so we should be able to combine both.

It turns out, however, that Xtext and GMF metamodels are slightly different and you need to take some precautious steps in order to make them interoperable.

After this excursion into the theory behind the convergence of graphical and textual editors, Jan showed two editors, one graphical and one textual that synced live. Changing the model in one editor and saving it effected an immediate update in the other editor - really neat.

Jan pointed out that this is all very fine, but sometimes you really want to have a tight integration. As a proof of concept, he showed a GMF-based editor with an embedded Xtext editor: as soon as he pressed F2 to edit a field in the graphical editor, an inline Xtext editor would pop up, featuring syntax highlighting, code completion and error markers - really awesome!

More information on Xtext and GMF can be found on their respective homepages. Jan works for itemis and provides consulting and training for these technologies.

All these exciting things must have made people gasp for air, because the oxygen level in the room was very low at the end of the session, so we had another break. As always with gathering like this, hallway talks very equally important as the sessions, and people made good use of the break:

RAP (Jochen Krause)

Jochen's presented his talk on RAP without a single slide - "in the tradition of the Karlsruhe DemoCamps", as he pointed out.

No technical session without some history and some theory, so Jochen first explained that RAP implements the Half Object Pattern and demoed the very first version of RAP. While running an Eclipse UI in the browser is all very exciting, feedback from initial users wasn't too positive: "please spare us this look'n'feel in the browser!"

So the good people at innoopract (now EclipseSource) spent some time to implement custom styling for RAP UIs, which Jochen showed in his second demo, which he called "The Enterprise Look'n'Feel" due to it's feasibility for enterprise applications.

The third demo featured "rounded corners" (see RAP New & Noteworthy). While this might seem like little gained, Jochen explained that implementing rounded corners was both important on an acceptance level and challenging on the implementation level. Would you have thought that rounded corners are implemented using CSS on FireFox and VML on Internet Explorer?

Of course, RAP is implemented as an Open Source project at Eclipse, welcoming any contribution from users worldwide. Jochen demonstrated how great the Open Source model works by showing off a ribbon-style command bar for RAP which is available on Google Code (see the rapit project home page)

In the next demo, Jochen showed how he integrated EMF and RAP. His goal was to RAPify the EMF tree editor for EMF models. It turned out that basically it is very simple to convert the EMF editor (or any other Eclipse plug-in for that matter) into a RAP application - only very little adjustments were needed. However, as web applications are multi-user applications by definition, additional care has to be taken when converting editors. As Eclipse is a single-user application, editors are not prepared to be executed in a multi-user environment. Jochen explained how he tried to use CDO to store the edited models on a remote server, but failed due to the complexities of CDO. He succeeded by using CouchDB, a database written in Erlang and with an HTTP interface (look ma - no JDBC driver needed!).

Jochen concluded his session with a few notes on features they've just completed (Drag'n'Drop) or which are not available (yet) like GC.paint.

After that, he took some of the audience's questions, e.g. "How many users can a RAP server take?". Of course, it depends, but you can roughly count 1MB per user and workbench.

Jochen thought it would be OK to continue without a break, but Martin decided we should rather have a short break to let in some air.

More information on RAP can be found on the Eclipse wiki and on the project homepage. Jochen's company EclipseSource provides professional services, training and resources around RAP, so have a look at their website.

50 ways to build your bundle (Gerd Wütherich & Nils Hartmann)

After the "short" break, Gerd Wütherich and Nils Hartmann presented their view on build management: "Fifty Ways to Buid Your Bundle":

Facing the fact that nobody seems to be too excited about build management these days, they decided to arrest people's attention by adapting the well-known story "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. A brilliant idea, which really made people laugh at various points throughout the presentation.

The presentation was subdivided in three parts:

The Ghost of Build Past
Gerd and Nils explained how in the past, people have been building bundes using PDE build, using a Manifest-First-approach. Building bundles with PDE build is rather cumbersome: you have to setup map files in order to help PDE build to derive ANT build files which will then be executed by the AntRunner inside Eclipse. While this ensures the build process sees exactly what Eclipse sees when you develop your bundles in the workspace, this basically makes debugging your build process very complicated.

The Ghost of Build Today
Today, we've got bundles everywhere and OSGi is being used not only for Eclipse plug-ins, but also for conventional applications. As good programers obeying the DRY principle, we want to have a redundancy-free description of our build artifacts, i.e. derive build dependencies by looking at MANIFEST.MF. In the enterprise, things can get really nasty, as we often need to integrate various very different build systems: you might have to build an EJB client JAR (maybe using Maven) which then need to be integrated in an Eclipse RCP client application, which again needs to be built using PDE build.

Nils and Gerd showed a slide which listed all major build tools for bundles, among them:

• Springsource Tool Suite
• PDE
• Athena
• PluginBuilder
• Buckminster
• Tycho
• Maven
• b3
• Ant4Eclipse
• PDE build
• bnd
• Ivy
• Buildr
• IDEA
• Sigil
• buildr4osgi
• OsgiPlugin
• ANT
• Bundlr

After which they showed three exemplary setups how to actually build bundles:

1. ANT4Eclipse
2. Maven Tycho
3. Buckminster

Please refer to their slide deck, slides 14 - 16 for detailed diagrams on these three setups:

Ghost of Build Future
As things get more complicated, build management will also most likely become more complicated. Gerd and Nils pointed out that build management might be an unthankful job, but it must not be assigned to "people that aren't good at programming". Instead, they advocated making build management a first class citizen in computer sciences education.

More information on the tools and techniques presented are available at their respective home pages. In addition, you can contact Nils and Gerd and bug them with your questions. They're consultants, so they can be hired.

redView - dynamic views for business applications

The final session was held by Ekkehard Gentz, better known as ekke. He showed a smart combination of Eclipse technologies: Riena, EMF, openArchitectureWare (Xpand, Xtend, MWE) and Xtext. Of course, being an Open Source advocate, Ekke and his team mate Florian provide this stack as an Open Source project on Google Code.

redView is a declarative framework based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), for creating RCP Views enriched with Riena Ridgets. It uses EMF to describe the application with a model. An Xpand-based code generator will then transform the model into code for the application. Ekke states that their goal is not to limit developers' creativity, but instead relieve them from the burden of having to write all the boilerplate code.

redView supports the most important UI elements, including some Nebula widgets. One thing I fond very impressive was their UI editor. Ekke gave a demo in which he hosted the UI model on a CDO (which seems to be Eclipse's wunderkind) server on a virtual machine. He started a second virtual machine, running an instance of the application. Upon changing the UI model in the UI designer on one machine, the UI was updated immediately on the second machine. Ekke pointed out that this usage pattern is especially useful in prototyping scenarios: the developer changes the model on his PC in his office and the customer can immediately see the changes on his machine, hundreds of kilometers away.

More information on redView can be obtained from their project homepage. Ekkehard is a freelance consultant, so you can hire him if you've got any questions regarding the technologies presented.

Gimmicks

After the demos, we raffled off 20 Eclipse Keybinding Mugs (see Kim Moir's blog post for a 360° shot of the mug) - congratulations to all winners! it-agile also provided a fine selection of agile swag: retrospective mugs, team calendars, post-its and what have you:

Despite the fact Ralph Müller couldn't attend the event, we eventually headed to the EAST bar for some frosty beverages.

All in all, it has been a very enjoyable event and from what I gathered, most attendees seem to have enjoyed the DemoCamp as well.

Thanks everyone for attending! Also, thank you to all speakers. Last but not least a big thank you to Natalia for taking pictures of the event!

Hope to see you again at the next DemoCamp in Summer 2010!

• Eclipse in the Enterprise: Lessons from Google
• Distributed OSGi
• Deploying Successful Enterprise Tools
• Build and Provision

all dealt with how Eclipse can be used in the Enterprise or which challenges you will face if you start using Eclipse in large-scale scenarios.

The talks

• Developing DSLs with Eclipse
• Eclipse in NASA Mission Control
• Build and Provision

either directly had modeling as their topic or used modeling technology to solve their problems. I especially liked the NASA talk which featured a number of computer animated videos of recent or future missions. The NASA mission control software is heavily based on Eclipse and technology form the Eclipse Modeling Project. Finally, there were some talk on runtime technology:

• OSGi for Eclipse Developers
• Developing for Android with Eclipse
• Google Plugin for Eclipse: Not Just for Newbies Any More

Attending great talks of course is one of the major benefits of going to a conference like this. To me, meeting other people and connecting has become even more important than attending great talks. Of course, this is nothing new to event organizers and so there were many chances to grab a drink and chat with the other attendees. With more than 170 people attending, it was hard to have a chat with everyone, but nevertheless I managed to talk to a number of people, many of which already are Xtext users or are now planing to have a detailed look at it. Even Google is using Xtext, but ssshh! Overall, I really enjoyed my two days at Google and look forward to more events like this. Speaking of which, Eclipse Summit Europe is approaching fast, so make sure you register on time. Also, if you're interested in Modeling and DSLs, we're organizing a Modeling / DSL Day in North America this coming fall - see my previous post for more info. And finally, here are the slides and the video of my talk:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dF ZQcGh3RDhrUUdyNTAtMXlVU2pKQ1E6MA..

Our goal is to organize an event especially for people new to modeling or who are curious what this modeling fuss is all about and how it can help them. So, this will not be an experts meeting, but you can meet experts talking about their topics. We also are interested in case studies, so ideally you will get first-hand experience from people who use modeling in real life to meet real challenges.

We welcome any feedback, so please fill out our little poll.

Neil was kind enough to invite someone from the "modeling/oAW folk", so Heiko Behrens will be giving an Xtext demo.

If you haven't had the chance to attend Code Generation 2009 or if you're curious what all this DSL talk is all about, I urge you to sign up for the DemoCamp now - it is free of charge.

I was fortunate enough to hear Heiko speak at the DemoCamp in Hamburg. Not only is Heiko a very good speaker (with a very convincing, deep voice), but also did he manage to come up with some very good examples of what a DSL is and why you should consider using them in your projects.

By the way, if you want to play around with Xtext before the DemoCamp, you can get a fresh copy from our download site at http://xtext.itemis.com.