Monday, October 13, 2014

Xtext, Xtend, JavaFX and Robots

It is autumn again and EclipseCon Europe 2014 is just around the corner. To me as an Eclipse committer from Germany ECE always feels a bit like meeting the family. In fact, I have been attending for seven years in a row now. I even remember the times when it was called Eclipse Summit Europe. Oh man, I am getting old…

As every year, my colleagues and me are contributing the program: I have counted 14 sessions by itemis and I am going to give three myself. Of course there is a lot about Xtext and Xtend, but also on other topics like Java performance or home automation. And itemis is sponsoring again.

For me it starts Tuesday morning: Sven and me are going to give a tutorial on Functional Programming With Xtend. Xtend — the JVM language developed at Eclipse — offers a great set of features to exploit the benefits of functional programming without the verbosity of Java. This session not only gives an introduction on functional programming in general but it is also a good opportunity to look beyond Duke’s nose. Bring your laptop, you are going to get your hands dirty!

No EclipseCon without me on graphical editing: In Diagrams, Xtext and UX I am going demonstrate how you can add diagrams to your textual Xtext languages without adding usability pains. I am going to use the JavaFX based framework FXDiagram which offers superior UI metaphors for the end users in combination with more freedom for the developer. Watch it in action on Tuesday afternoon.

On Wednesday, Holger and me are going to show you what’s New & Noteworthy in Xtext. We have recently finalized the Xbase API for DSLs with expressions, concurrency in the IDE has been reworked, we have parallelized the builder and much more. We plan to give a sneak preview of the IntelliJ support as well.

But the ultimate reason why you must attend EclipseCon Europe 2014 is going to be at our booth. Miro, Holger and me have created a new game for you using all the technologies above (and more). So be prepared to encounter these two guys.