EclipseCon 2011 Slides

EclipseCon 2011 was once again a cool conference, even though I really needed a week of holiday to recover from the bad weather, the jet-lag and the general lack of sleep :-) This is why it took me some time to upload the slides of our presentations. But better late than never, here they are.

First, Sebastian and me presented What's Cooking in Xtext 2.0. The room was almost full, and when I asked a vast majority of the audience had already had contact with Xtext. To me that shows that Xtext has really become mainstream, a really good feeling. Here are the slides:

What's Cooking in Xtext 2.0

On Thursday, Sven, Sebastian and me gave the tutorial on Pragmatic DSL Design with Xtext. There were so many participants, that we had to switch rooms with Stephan Herrmann's tutorial on Object Teams. Thanks for that, Stephan! And here are our slides:

Pragmatic DSL Design with Xtext, Xbase and Xtend 2

EclipseCon 2010 - Xtext everywhere

It's the last day of this year's EclipseCon. My second time in Santa Clara and I even liked it better than last year: Many intriguing talks around Eclipse, OSGi, e4 and others, interesting people, much time for getting to know each other.

The itemis team has had a fair share on the program: With Moritz and Heiko, I gave a workshop in which we showed how to build an Xtext editor for the e4 workbench model. I also had a lightning talk on my favorite topic "Combining text and graphics in modeling editors". As always, you can download the slides to all talks from slideshare. We also had talks on Xtext, MWE2, Xpand and model-driven iPhone application development.


Xtext has been ubiquitous. We have seen a lot of cool Xtext editors in many talks. Quite a bunch of people came to our booth just to say thank you for the cool piece of software we've been working on for the past years. The absolute highlight was when Xtext received the Eclipse Community Award for the most innovative Eclipse project. It is so inspiring to get such a huge amount of positive feedback.

NASA also sponsored a competition of building a e4 client to control a small robot simulating the Mars Rover. Peter and Heiko have decided not to sleep but to rather build an iPhone client instead. Even though it was not based on e4, people were really impressed. Watch Jeff Norris from NASA driving the rover with an iPhone! By the way, Jeff gave the best keynote I have ever seen on "Rocket Science and the Republic".

Tonight will be the European Reception sponsored by itemis and the conference will end. We'll have another day in San Francisco before returning home to Germany. I hope I will make it next year again. Thanks to the organizational team for giving such a wonderful conference.

Source code for the screencast of Xtext and GMF

Having received a lot of positive feedback for my last post, I finally found the time to make the source code available. You can find it in the SVN repository of the GMFTools project.

I have put the installation instructions here.

Note that this is proof-of-concept code rather than production quality. See my previous post for implementational details. Also note that two open bugs

• http://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=281014
  
• http://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=284850
  

currently limit the fun a little bit, but we're at least working on the Xtext part.

New Article on Textual DSLs with EMP

Peter, Sven and me, we have composed an Eclipse article on how to create your own textual DSL using tools from the Eclipse Modeling Project (EMP). It covers the definition of a grammar using Xtext, generating, running and customizing the DSL editor, adding constraints with Check and generating code with Xpand. You can find it here.

We are convinced that the described approach one of the most pragmatic ways of designing DSLs and implement code generators. If you have just a little bit of experience with the described technologies, creating your own external DSL becomes nearly as natural as writing Java code.