Xtext, Robots and Quirk Busters in San Francisco

Spring is around the corner and it is time for another EclipseCon NA.

This year I will be pretty busy: As some of my colleagues unfortunately cannot make it, I took over their sessions, resulting in one talk or tutorial per conference day. And as we decided to bring our XRobots game to our booth, that will likely keep me occupied for the rest of the conference. But I am really looking forward to it!

On Monday morning, Holger and me are giving a tutorial on Xtext for Beginners. Remember to bring your Laptop, as you are going to get your hands dirty implementing your first domain-specific language to create a Web-Application. Harbour A - Monday, 09:00 to 12:00.

On Tuesday, I am going to tell you why it is hard to integrate diagram editors with Xtext or an existing text-based IDE, and show how you can improve the user experience of a combined textual and graphical IDE. I will use FXDiagram, a framework that focuses on UX and keeping the developer in charge. It has made made great progress recently, so it is ready for adoption. Diagrams, Xtext and UX, Grand Peninsula EFG - Tuesday, 14:15 to 14:50



Wednesday is Xtext Day, an entire track exclusively on Xtext. I am going to substitute Moritz in the talk on Scoping, Linking and Indexing. From my experience, this is one of the first hurdles a language implementer has to take when using Xtext. Bayside AB - Wednesday, 15:00 to 15:35

XRobots is a robot sumo fight game. Players can challenge each other in writing the best script to push the opponent off the ring or tip him over. We are providing the game almost during the entire conference at our booth. All you need to participate is a web browser and some ambition to win :-) It has already been a huge success at EclipseCon Europe and Devoxx Belgium, so we hope the North Americans are as geek as the Europeans. If you want to know how we implemented it, you have to attend my session The Making of XRobots, Grand Peninsula EFG - Thursday, 14:30 to 15:05.

XRobots at EclipseCon Europe 2014

EclipseCon Europe 2014 was special to me: Miro, Holger and me had been preparing a robot game for our booth, and I was very curious whether it would work as expected and more than that whether people would like it. It turned out to be a blast: Some attendees even spent the after hours to work on their programs offline, and returned to our booth the next day to prove it. And even for those who didn't choose to compete, it was still a great show to watch.

The game works as follows: You write a script to control a robot in a wrestling fight. You win the game when your robot turns the opponent over or pushes it outside of the ring. Within the script, you can define how your robot should react on specific conditions, e.g. when it is close to the opponent. The robots can move, rotate, drive curves and lift up their scoop. You can read the own and the opponent’s position, view direction and speed.

The DSL is of course implemented with Xtext. You only need a web browser to join the game. We have enhanced Holger’s Xtext in the Web code to provide a web-editor with the usual Xtext goodies such as live validation, content assist, syntax highlighting, hovers etc. It worked really well and we plan to spend more time on Xtext in the web soon. As we have embedded the expression library Xbase, you can use all kind of expression and control structures.

To run your script you have enter a token which is shown on the game display at our booth. As soon as both robots are assigned, the scripts are executed by an interpreter on our game server, which makes two Lego Mindstorms robots engage in a fight.

The involved tools include Lejos, Xtend, Xtext with Xbase, Eclipse, Orion, Jetty, JavaFX and more. To locate the robots precisely enough we had to go for a video solution based on OpenCV. The Making-Of has been rather exciting, so we decided to file a talk on this for EclipseCon NA 2015. If you plan to attend and want to hear the story, vote for it!

The robots’ next gig will be at Devoxx in Antwerp next week. Of course we’ll bring them to  EclipseCon 2015 in San Francisco, too.

Apart from the robots, EclipseCon Europe 2014 was again gorgeous. The three sessions I gave went fine, I met a lot of really nice people and for the first time I had the time to watch the amazing Circus Eclipse. Thanks to the organizers and to the community to make EclipseCon such a great event.

PS: Our talk The Making of XRobots has been selected as one of three early birds for EclipseCon NA 2015! See you there!

Join My Pie Fight Session at EclipseCon Europe 2011

Competition is hard at EclipseCon: Everybody has to make sure to get the most participants into his talk. As Sven already announced a quiz for the same timeslot as mine I've had to figure out something even more exciting.

So here's my idea for my session:

I'll begin the session ranting on every Eclipse project that's somehow related to graphics. I'll shamelessly reveal all of their weaknesses. Everybody involved in one of these projects will be so offended that they start to get personal, first against me then against each other. When emotions boil up, I expect people to self-organize in teams, like The Knights of GMF Runtime or The Zest'o'Maniacs. My session is at 5pm so I expect a good supply of cake as in the years before. I am starting the fight by throwing the first cake, e.g. on the GMF Tooling Ultras. They try to answer but unluckily hit a member of the Spray Front, who's already in the midst of a quarrel with a Graphiti Warrior. Thinking it was a GEF Cyclope who threw the cake... A real pie fight breaks loose.

Hehehe (demonic laughter)

Well... thinking again... the cake at EclipseCon is usually quite yummy. It would be a pity to waste it in such a way. Maybe I should come up with something more peaceful.

OK, I see, I have to make that differently: I am going to point to some general issues with graphical editing. I'll weigh the cost against the usefullness and show, why an interpreted graphical view is so much simpler to implement and to use than a graphical editor. Second part will be a live demo of a prototype for such a framework.

Maybe I should bring a helmet, just in case someone did not notice my change of plan.

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

Did I mention EclipseCon?

I just realized that I haven't blogged on this year's EclipseCon yet. Time to do that. You might have guessed it:


As a committer to several Eclipse projects, I am really looking forward to meeting "the family". It's always been big fun and I guess it will be the same this year. But the main reason for going there is of course:


Together with Sebastian I will give a talk on What's cooking in Xtext 2.0 on Tuesday at 2pm. We're eager to show you all the new features of Xtext we've been working on during the last months, especially the expression language library Xbase and the code generation langauge Xtend.

You should not miss our tutorial
Pragmatic DSL Design with Xtext, Xbase and Xtend 2 on Thursday at 10:30am. Sven will join us to give you a walk through tutorial on a modern way of creating DSLs. We just had another rehearsal on this one and I promise you it will be a real burner.


All of that wouldn't have been possible without the support from the company we're working for: itemis. Into the bargain we're bronze sponsors for this years conference.
It is great to work for a company that really lives open source.

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.

EMF Index Creation Review

Tomorrow will be the creation review for the new EMFT subproject EMF Index. I am really looking forward to my first Eclipse project leadership and I hope everything will work out fine at the review.

EMF Index aims at indexing EMF models to allow scalable modeling tools with JDT-like comfort. So, if you have any objections against EMF Index, speak now (in the EMFT newsgroup) or remain silent forever ;-)

I am also glad to have the opportunity to present EMF Index at EclipseCon 2009 in Santa Clara. Looks like many of the interested parties will attend. I am going to give another talk together with Sven on Next generation textual DSLs with Xtext. It's also my first trip to the US, which makes me even more excited.