As every year EclipseCon Europe is fixed in my schedule, and I am excited to go there. It is a melting pot for the Eclipse Community, a big family come together. I am in the last preparations before departure to Ludwigsburg, and can’t wait to finally go there.
itemis is of course sponsoring EclipseCon Europe, and we will have a booth in front of the theater. With 12 talks, 8 speakers and about 20 attendees I am expecting that the it(emis)-Crowd is again the biggest party at EclipseCon Europe. The itemis booth will be the place where you will have the highest chance to meet me, but of course there is plenty of time to meet each other.
Meeting the Scout and Modeling community
As in the past years, I will start my journey already on sunday. I will again join the Eclipse Scout community’s pre-conference dinner at the Rossknecht. The past years I was joining on monday the Scout User Group meeting, but this year I committed to join the Guided Tour on Eclipse Modeling at the Unconference. At 14:40 I will give there my first talk, an insight on the Xtend language.
Xtext and Platform development
This Friday, Oct 20th, Xtext 2.13 was released finally and I have invested quite some time in the past months to find and resolve bugs. I have worked intensively with the Eclipse EARI system, and investigated together with Christian Dietrich the problem reports we are getting in. Until we now managed to get less problem reports in than we are processing. Christian and I are those who care most about user problems and we have fixed together the majority of bugs for this and the past releases. Christian does an incredible job! We will happily share insights on the current state on Xtext at the Unconference and all conference days.
The past months I starting getting involved into the Eclipse Platform itself. While before I completely focused on Xtext development and just used the platform, I thought it was time to give something back. I am using Eclipse every day and still love to work with it. I am recognizing that others prefer other IDEs, or even new ones are built, and there are reasons for that. But still for complex development tasks I believe that an extensible desktop IDE like Eclipse is the best tool. Eclipse has some flaws, and I could help there. Now I am frequently contributing to the Eclipse Platform (with focus on performance, usability and stability) and found into the development process, which took me some time. Because of this engagement I am expecting to have some interersting talks on platform development with some driving persons like Lars Vogel, Dani Megert, Alexander Kurtakov, Mickael Istria, Mikaël Barbero or Andrey Loskutov. I have to thank them for guiding me in the process and reviewing my changes carefully. Guys, I owe you a beer at the Nestor bar!
A conference day (almost) never ends
Nestor bar, the place to be after the long conference day! You will find me there each evening from monday on till late. Like every year it will be hard to celebrate long and get up early. But be sure, I’ll manage that. It isn’t the first time, and won’t be the last. The party ain’t over until it’s over.
I’m not staying at Nestor; like last year I reserved early a room at the nearby Villa Forêt. It is just a 5 minute walk (and some walking does not harm) and fine for me. It was in this hotel where I met Philip Wenig some years ago at breakfast. Ever since then I had nice talks with him and I always enjoy that. This year I already met him twice: At the Eclipse DemoCamp in Zurich, and at Eclipse Hackathon Hamburg.
Talks at the main conference
This year, besides my Xtend talk at the Unconference, I will give 2 talks at EclipseCon:
“Introduction to Expression Languages with Xtext” (Tuesday 14:30, Silchersaal) will give you some patterns in Xtext grammers when you need to embed expressions in your language. Xtext ships with Xbase, which is a full expression langauge that you can easily integrate, but sometimes Xbase is not the right choice for you. Xbase is tightly bound to the Java typesystem and JDT, and for your language this could be undesired. Then you have to build your own expression language, which is a bit advanced. But you can learn a lot from Xbase, and in this talk I will show some grammar patterns that you could take from Xbase. I already gave this talk at EclipseCon France this year, so most of the slides are fortunately prepared.
Different for my second talk: “Advanced Oomph Setup Authoring” (Wednesday 12:00, Silchersaal). This is completely new, and I am right now working on the slide deck. I was responsible for developing Xtext’s Oomph setup, which is compared to other setups at Eclipse more complex. But I have learned much from the other setups. Again, there are some patterns that can be recognized among the different setups. I will show and explain screenshots from different setups and discuss some advantages or disadvantages from then. Oomph is a mighty framework, and creating good setups is a time consuming and error prone work. The information given in this talk should give some help to author more robust setups, and build them faster. Advanced Oomph users might recognize that they do already much right, but even they might get the one or other idea to enhance their setups. Users rather new with Oomph will get the most out of this talk. They should at least have a basic idea about Oomph project setups.
Lightning Talks at the itemis booth
This year we will give some 5-Minute Lightning Talks at our booth in pauses. We have a lot of interesting small talks this time, from Xtext to Java 9, and even where plastic plants play a role. Just come around to the exhibitor’s area in front of the theater and get some inspiration.
Also here I have 2 slots:
- Tuesday 15:50: “What’s new in Eclipse Photon?”: Let me show you a sneak preview on some features coming in Photon. You will see some of my contributions and some other.
- Wednesday 15:20: “A committer’s view on Eclipse Automated Error Reporting”: As said before, AERI helped me a lot to improve Xtext and Eclipse Platform. I’ll show you what committers see from problems reported to it and how it can help to find bugs. Also, a big Thank You to the guys from Codetrails for the support!
Follow @itemis on Twitter to get notice on further talks from us!
The most important thing at EclipseCon is…
the people! I love to meet all the people again, from which most of them I only see once a year. This year I have already attended Eclipse Converge/, DevoXX US and EclipseCon France, so some of you folks I have already met again. But EclipseCon Europe is by far larger and more intensive. To all the people I already know, from year to year they become more.
Eclipse on the roll
It is a pleasure to see which companies and projects joined the Eclipse Foundation recently. Since I have a background in Java Enterprise development from early beginnings (yes, I had to implement bean managed persistence with EJB 1.0 in the ancient days and it was NOT funny!), I was delighted to see EE4J at Eclipse. Then IBM’s J9, Deeplearning4J, and the story is not over yet. If this continues, the Eclipse Foundation has a bright future and I am glad that itemis is a driving part of the story.
For this year’s EclipseCon Europe some of this hot new stuff might come a bit too late, but I expect more talks related to these exciting technologies next year. Yes, there are already some talks, but I think the focus will shift from now on.
And finally: Time to rest
After EclipseCon I’m taking a week off. I need this already, and will desperately need this after this exciting and exhausting week. Back to my beloved family, who is awaiting me after a long week. Who knows, maybe my second daughter Sophia is walking then? Can’t be long anymore.
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