Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 retrospective

Attending Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 once again felt like a big family meeting. It is always a pleasure to meet people you usually only correspond with electronically in person. The organization was once again almost perfect and the food excellent. Thanks a lot to the organizers and sponsors!

We had a very productive project meeting for the EMF Index project, clarifying a lot of critical points and further aligning the efforts and requirements of the involved parties.

Markus, Sebastian, Karsten and me were impressed by the large number of about 50 participants in our workshop on Domain-specific Languages with Eclipse Modeling. The slides are now online at slideshare, just in case you're interested. With such an audience it was of course a little bit difficult to make it a real hands-on experience, but I think we at least managed to leave a good impression on the presented toolchain.

Jos's and my talk on Combining text and graphics in modeling tools was also well attended, and from the quality of questions that were asked I guess our message has been understood. The slides are also available at slideshare.

Apart from a number of really impressive talks, the thing that most impressed me was SAP's graphical editing framework. Instead of using a code-generation approach it rather focusses on an provider-based Java API. They are currently in the process of adapting it to EMF and their plan is to make it open source. I hope they really do, because it seems to have the potential of greatly reducing the complexity of creating graphical editors.

Eclipse Summit Europe 2009

I am looking forward to Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

My colleagues from itemis and me, we're once again going to have our share:

Sebastian Zarnekow, Karsten Thoms, Markus Voelter and me are going to give a tutorial on Domain-specific Languages with Eclipse Modeling, in which we show how to set up your own easy-to-use MDSD toolchain.

In the short talk Combining Graphics and Text in Modeling Tools, Jos Warmer and me will be elaborating on mixing concrete syntaxes for the same model using state-of-the-art modeling tool frameworks such as Xtext and GMF.

In the talk Xtext - From Galileo to Helios, Sven Efftinge and Sebastian Zarnekow are presenting the future plans for Xtext.

Finally, Andreas Graf and Markus Voelter are going to talk on Leighweight Model-Driven Development for Embedded Systems.

So, maybe there's something in for you, too?