Maps, Services, Relations and Reuse: Eclipse DemoCamp Hamburg
On November 10th, the Hamburg Eclipse DemoCamp took place in the stylish EAST Hotel.
We had 45 reservations and almost all of them made it to the Camp. I always get a little bit nervous 15 minutes before the event starts if no more than 10 people have shown up so far, but I guess that's alright.
Martin and I welcomed the crowd on behalf of our sponsors (Eclipse Foundation, froglogic, it-agile and itemis):
After that, Harald Wellmann of Harman Becker told us that the world is a disc. Well, at least he and his company try to make it a disc again - Harald leads a team that develops a so called "map compiler". A map compiler takes map source data and condenses that data by extracting only the relevant parts of it. As you may guess this is a long-running process which can hugely benefit from parallelization. Harald and his team use OSGi to modularize their software and make sure they use computing resources efficiently. One thing worth noting is that OSGi is even being used in car entertainment systems: Harald told us about one entertainment system which makes use of OSGi to act as an intermediate / glue layer between the UI (written in Java) and the core (written in C++).
Gerd Wütherich (Independent) continued where Harald stopped and showed us how to use Spring Dynamic Modules and OSGi in his excellent talk - interspersed with some neat demos:
Together with Nils Hartmann, Mathias Lübken and Bernd Kolb, he wrote the first German book on OSGi, so he really knows what he is talking about.
After those talks, we took a break to grab some refreshments and take the chance to get in touch with the other attending Eclipse enthusiasts. I had the impression that everybody had a good time discussing all things Eclipse - in fact Martin and I had to interrupt a lot of lively discussions for the second run of talks.
In the first talk after the break, Miguel Garcia and Rakesh Prithiviraj (both Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg) gave us an update of their research on how to integrate LINQ (Language Integrated Queries) in Java:
The final demo was deliverd by Stephan Herrmann who showed us Object Teams / Equinox, an amazing piece of software that can be used to re-use existing Eclipse plug-ins in an aspect-oriented way. To get an idea of how powerful this approach is, have a look at the following screenshot - this is the JDT, but enhanced by Object Teams in order to support their very own syntax extensions for Java:
To learn more about Object Teams, browse to their web site at http://trac.objectteams.org/ot/wiki/OtEquinox.
Everyone in the room was quite impressed with what is possible with Object Teams / Equinox, so you should check it out (it's available for free). If you can manage to go the DemoCamp in Berlin, you'll have the chance to see it live.
The feedback we received from the attendees was great - some people even sent emails thanking us for organizing the event, so I guess the DemoCamp can be considered a success!
Eclipse DemoCamps
It's that time of year again - demo time!
Being run for the third time, demo camps can be considered an integral part of the Eclipse calender of events. Attending a DemoCamp is great. If you haven't yet been to any Eclipse DemoCamp, let me briefly summarize why I think you should consider going to one:
- see cool technology in action (well, that's the whole point of a DemoCamp, isn't it)
- get to know Eclipse-minded people from your area
- have some frosty beverages and fingerfood (well, that actually depends on how the camp is organized)
- see some exciting buildings from inside (again, depends on how the camp is organized)
Oh, did I mention that Eclipse DemoCamps are free? Thanks to the Eclipse Foundation and many sponsoring member companies, you get to enjoy all those nice things for absolutely free.
Here are some of my favorite demos:
- Jingwen Owen Ou on WikiText for Mylyn
- Jochen Krause on Eclipse 4.0
- Harald Wellmann on Geodata Processing for Car Navigation Systems
- Florian Fieber and Max Bureck on From Model to Code - A Comparison of M2M and M2T Technologies in Eclipse Modeling
- Dave Savage on Newton - a distributed OSGi application runtime
- Jens von Pilgrim on GEF goes 3D: GEF3D
- Eike Steppe on CDO Model Repository
- Boris Bokowski and Eric Moffatt on the e4 Programming Model and e4 Modeled UI, respectively
- Martin Taal on EMF/Teneo
By the way, if we were to award the price of the most indefatigable DemoCamp presenter, it'd go to Wassim Melhem. You can meet him at no less than three locations: Iasi (Romania), Warszawa (Poland), Poznan (Poland).
Hope I could convince you to attend one of the many DemoCamps. I'll be at the DemoCamps in Hamburg and Leipzig, so see you there!
MDSD Today 2008 Recap
From October 15 to October 17, MDSD Today 2008 took place at the Nordakademie in Elmshorn near Hamburg, Germany. The conference, which had been organized by Frank Zimmermann (Nordakademie), Simon Zambrovski and yours truly, was intended to bring together practioners, researchers and people from both industry and business.
We were fortunate enough to aquire a number of well-known speakers, most notably Axel Uhl (SAP) and Ed Merks (of EMF fame).
On the first day, Axel and Ed delivered their excellent keynotes on the current state of affairs in modeling.
Ed commented on a number of misconceptions he has been confronted with during the last few years such as "modeling is too complicated", "modeling will just get into my way" or "modeling will limit my creativity". The bottom line of his talk was that although you might not realize it, models drive most software (just think of all the data models you're dealing with in business applications). However, using source code as a representation for your models might not always be the best solution - to gain both a better overview of your software and be more efficient with respect to software development, you should think about raising the level of abstraction, e.g. by using domain specific modeling tools that let you focus on the structure of your model instead of having to deal with (basically irrelevant) syntactical details of the target language. If working at a higher level of abstraction makes things more complicated for you, you're doing something wrong.
Axel picked up this idea in his keynote on "Current Challenges for Industrial Software Development Tools and Languages" stating that any computer program can be conceived as a model. Since models are independent of their visual representation, they can be represented in various different forms, the most common being text, trees and diagrams of any kind. The question, however, whether to choose text or the abstract model as the primary artifact for storing. A textual representation clearly has advantages with respect to diffing and merging and can be handled with commonly used tools such as CVS nd plain text editors. Using the abstract model as the primary artifact allows for overlapping partial views. Since this model can persisted in some kind of repository, access to the model very much feels like working with a database. In particular, there's no need to parse any text back and forth between the model and an editor. The decision whether to store models as text or in a repository largely depends on boundary decisions, like the availability of the repository technology, the robustness of the mapping between the textual representation and the model, language characteristics, the number of developers who need to work on the model in parallel, the size of the software system built with the model and the life cycle of the software. Axel concluded that on one hand, modeling is not that much different from coding and that, on the other hand, DSLs are becoming increasingly important due to the complexity of UML.
One of the nice thing about conferences is you get to talk to people who are interested in the same topics as you are. MDSD Today has been no different - during the breaks you could see people involved in all kinds of discussions.
Later that day, Stefan Reichert and Birger Garbe of Lufthansa Systems shared their experiences regarding model driven software projects with us. The topic of their talk was "Model Driven Software Development in Business Projects: Chance or Risk?" Their anwser to this question was that if've got the right tools, MDSD is a chance and can help you to build better software.
Thomas Stahl of b+m concluded the day with his talk on how MDSD, BMP and SOA fit together:
The second and third day of the conference were crammed with hands-on tutorials on MDSD tools like EMF, Xtext, Xpand and GMF. Quite a lot of people attended the tutorials as you can see from the pictures.
Arno had to overcome the hardship of a broken beamer, so he had to use arms and legs to explain:
Overall, the conference was a real success and I am looking forward to seeing you all again at MDSD Today 2009!
Call for Papers / Participation: MDSD Today 08
From October 15th - 17th, the second workshop on model driven software development "MDSD Today" will take place in Elmshorn near Hamburg, Germany.
The goal of this conference is to provide a platform for professionals (managers, architects and engineers alike) in the field of model driven software development to meet and exchange ideas.
The three day will be organized into the following major blocks:
- Management Day
- Research Papers and Industrial Reports
- MDSD Tutorials
The management day will feature keynotes by Dr. Axel Uhl (Chief Development Architect with SAP) and Ed Merks (of Eclipse Modeling fame).
Tutorials on various MDSD-related topics (such as model-to-model transformations, model-to-text transformations, external textual DSLs) will be delivered by members of the Eclipse Modeling Project on day 2 and day 3 of the conference.
If you use model driven software development in your daily work, please consider giving a presentation.
If you do not use MDSD and would like to hear about other's experiences, you should consider participating in the conference and take the chance to attend the MDSD tutorials. At EUR 350 for three days, that's a real bargain.
The CfPs and more information on the conference can be found here (english) and here (german).
Hope to see you there!
Eclipse DemoCamp Hamburg review
Yesterday, the Eclipse DemoCamp in Hamburg took place in the beautiful "Speicherstadt" in Hamburg:
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We had about 50 registrations and more than 40 people actually showed up:
After a short introduction by Martin and me, Sven (itemis AG) gave an introduction to Xtext and highlighted some o the new features in the upcoming version Xtext 2.0.
Matthias Lübken of it-agile gave a talk on GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and OSGi and showed us how easy it is to build great-looking web-applications that can be dynamically enhanced by means of OSGi runtime features like loading / unloading bundles. Matthias mentioned several times that Gunnar Wagenknecht provided a patch that fixes some classloading issues in the serialization code. So Gunnar, thanks again!
Thanks to itemis, it-agile and of course the Eclipse Foundation who all sponsored the event, we could then enjoy a break with drinks and some sandwiches.
After the break, Stefan Reichert of Lufthansa Systems presented his Plug-in Wickedshell that enables you to execute shell scripts for your favourite command shell from inside Eclipse.
Reginald Stadlbauer of Froglogic gave a demo of their GUI testing tool, Squish. Besides being able to create test scripts for a wide variety of GUI technologies, Squish can also create GUI tests for Eclipse RCP / SWT applications. You can modify the scripts afterwards, and introduce conditions, which is great.
The demos were concluded by a presentation on the topic of "Generation of format adapters for SAP XI. A model driven approach." by Frank Zimmermann of the Nordakademie and two of his students, Henning Banneitz and Stefan Tanck. It very nicely showed how to use modern technology (Xtext) to tackle legacy technology (EDI / EDIFACT).
They finished just in time so all soccer fans could watch the encounter Germany - Austria, which also was a success (at least for the German team).
A big thank-you is due to our sponsors, it-agile, itemis and the Eclipse Foundation. Martin and I would especially like to say "thank you" to Arne Roock for taking care of all he organizational details!
Also thanks a lot to everyone who attended the Camp! We would to gather feedback on how you liked the camp, so pleace voice your opinion on the poll.
Here is a list of resource (slides, screencasts and screenshots) for your reference:
OOP conference: MDSD and Eclipse (update)
At the OOP conference in Munich, we demoed some model driven IDEs at the Gentleware booth. To give you an impression, we have recorded some videos of two LEGO Mindstorms robots that have been programmed in a visual development environment based on Eclipse. The IDE has been developed by two Students of the Nordakademie and their Professor, Frank Zimmermann.
Eclipse DemoCamp Hamburg recap
Earlier this week, the Hamburg edition of the Eclipse DemoCamp took place in a Spanish restaurant next to the Gentleware office. We had more than 50 registrations and 9 talk proposals. With 48 people showing up and 8 talks being delivered, I should say that the DemoCamp was a huge success.
We had a very good mix of people - a large number of Eclipse IDE users, some tool vendors and some RCP clients. Some people even came here from Frankfurt just to see one particular demo! Simon reports that most people had a sound background of Eclipse.
Unfortunately, I had become ill just the day before the camp and so couldn't attend, which really is a pity. However, as Marco Kuznik of Loroma was so kind as to record all talks on digital video, I will be able to watch the demos as soon as he puts them online on www.loroma.com. That's what the community can do for you. Thanks Marco!
The most impressive demo according to Enrico and Simon seems to have been a model-driven LEGO mindstorms robot chasing a "cat" (an orange ballon). This demo was delivered by Frank Zimmermann.
Here are some pictures of the event:
More pictures can be found here. Thanks Simon!
I would like to say a big thank you to all presenters and of course the Eclipse Foundation who made this event possible.
Hope to see you soon!
OOP 2007
I am on my way to OOP 2007 conference in Munich. Today at 14:00, I'll be giving a talk on Open Source MDA together with Stefan Reichert of Lufthansa Systems. If you happen to be there, drop by and say hello. You can also meet me at the Gentleware booth in the exhibition area.
Leaving Lufthansa Systems
I am leaving Lufthansa Systems to join Gentleware.
I joined Lufthansa in August 1996, when I started my studies in computer sciences at Nordakademie, Elmshorn. After finishing my studies in early 2000, I started my career as a software engineer with Lufthansa Systems. My first team developed a tool that helped administrators to install Windows PCs unattended. Most of the code was written in Delphi and DOS Batch. After 1 year, I had the opportunity to join another team who were writing enterprise applications in Java. Although I had never written a single line of Java code before, I was given the chance to join the team (mostly because I had some experience with distributed systems and CORBA). The team was rather small when I joined (only three developers, including me, and one boss), but grew up to 15 developers in about 2 years. We had some good fun writing J2EE applications (and frameworks).
In 2004, I was looking for a tool thet helped me to quickly create a Struts-based application and came across AndroMDA. This was an important step on my way into the world of model driven software development. I started using AndroMDA in my J2EE projects, and soon started contributing patches to AndroMDA. Sortly after, I was invited to join AndroMDA as a committer.
Gentleware is a well-known company in the realm of modeling tools and I first met Gentleware's CEO Marco Boger at JAX 2004 when Matthias Bohlen and I gave a talk on AndroMDA. In 2006, Gentleware were looking for a Software Architect to join their team and help them to further develop their new Eclipse based roundtrip engineering tool Apollo.
My main areas of work in my new job will be to help make Apollo a great UML tool that integrates with model driven approaches like MDA and MDSD. Also, I will serve as a Software Architect on J2EE projects.
If you happen to be at OOP 2007 in Munich, just drop by the Gentleware booth and say hi. I will be there not only to present Apollo and Poseidon (our modelling tools), but also to give a talk on Open Source MDA.
iX conference “Better Software”
I will be presenting on how we used Eclipse RCP to create a sophisticated, mission critical application for a cargo operator at the iX conference "Better software" later this year.
The backend of this system has been built using AndroMDA - have a look at this posting for more information on which other technologies were used in this project.
