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?

CodeGeneration 2009

I am back at Cambridge (UK) for this year's Code Generation conference.

The itemis-Kiel team already arrived yesterday, and after a nice walk through the town and some fish and chips, I finished a showcase with a GMF editor on an Xtext model. So be prepared for another converging editors screencast soon :-)

The conference started this morning. Up to now, I have heard two talks: First, Kathleen Dollard from AppVenture talked about Template Specialization. Kathleen referred to the .NET code generation languages and their specific problems, e.g. with respect to modularity and extensibility. To me it looked like we've got more comfortable solutions in the Eclipse/Java world. Then, Sven and Sebastian talked about Challenges in DSL Design. They elaborated that todays external DSLs usually stop at modeling behavior because of the lack of an embeddable expression language. Looks like that's going to be one of the goals in the next version of Xtext. Right now I am guarding the itemis booth for a while, just to join the case study by Karsten and Heiko on their MDSD projects at Deutsche Börse AG.

Despite all prejudice against British food, catering is excellent. Thanks to the perfect organisation by Mark Dalgarno and Andy Moorley, we're going on a traditional punting trip along the river Cam tonight. Should I have brought my wetsuit?

Talks at JAX Conference in Germany

Sven and me, we're going to give some talks on Eclipse Modeling, DSLs and Xtext at the JAX conference in Mainz (Germany) next week:

Eclipse Modeling - Overview
Sven Efftinge, Jan Köhnlein
Tue 21/04/2009, 10:00-11:15h

Code generation in agile Projects
Sven Efftinge, Jan Köhnlein
Tue 21/04/2009, 16:45-17:45h

Xtext
Sven Efftinge
Wed 22/04/2009, 10:15-11:15h

EMF: Beyond the Basics
Jan Köhnlein
Wed 22/04/2009, 16:15-17:15h

Hope to see you there!

OOP 2009

I am at the OOP 2009 conference in Munich. Lots of technical talks on software engineering, but soft skills are also a big topic. Even though our both is not really 80 square meters as promised, we are having lot of fun.
Yesterday, Sven and I had a talk on the introduction of three DSLs in a customer project: A textual DSL based on Xtext describing the domain model, a graphical DSL based on GMF for defining form layouts and an internal Java DSL for validation. I think we managed to entertaining the audience, as we made fancy slides in the "Presentation Zen" style. Measured by the amount of questions the talk was a success.