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.
Revenge of the waterfall
If you thought you'd escaped waterfall projects, have a look at this conference site. Great stuff! Long live the waterfall 
A vision of Eclipse
Here are some thoughts from Mike Milinkovich's keynote on Eclipse titled "A Vision of Eclipse":
- Primary goal of Eclipse is to build a general purpose tool platform.
- Writing software is hard - mostly because of all the people you have to talk to.
- One of the biggest problem in developing software is integrating all the tools you have to use. Eclipse is trying to provide a universal tooling platform to enable all of the tools to talk to each other.
- Eclipse is never done: there is always a new language to integrate, there is always a new platform to run on.
- There are around 415 committers on various projects around Eclipse
- The RCP platform was almost entirely community-driven.
JAX 2005 started!
Today, JAX 2005 started with an overwhelming number of 120 sessions. Detailed information can be found here, a live blogging site has been set up here. The topics most intersting for me are Eclipse, Modelling and the current discussion around heavyweight (EJB-centric) and lightweight (Spring, PicoContainer) containers.
Currently, I am attending Craig Russel's keynote on persistence. He started with a nice story about architects:
A manager, an engineer and an architect are traveling to a fereign country. They are stopped at the customs and are asked what they do. "We are selling object relational mapping", they answer. "Oh, intersting", the customs officer replies, "Which kind of object relational mapping?". The reply is "We are doing Java Data Objects". The customer says: "Oh, in this country we are using Toplink. I am sorry, but we'll have to kill you." The manager, the engineer and the architects have to stand in a row. When it comes to shooting the manager, the gun is jammed. "This must be divine revelation, you are free to go", says the customs officer and the manager leaves. Now the engineer is about to be shot, but the gun blocks again. He may go as well. The architect is the last man standing. "Is there anything you want to say before we shoot you?" - "Oh yes, " answers the architect, "I think I know what the problem is."
