• What: Eclipse DemoCamp November 2009
• Where: Hotel East, Hamburg ( Simon-von-Utrecht-Str. 31, 20359 Hamburg, Germany)
• When: December 4th 2009, 18:30-22:00 (official part)

If you want to attend, make sure you find a minute to write you name down in EclipseWiki. I suppose these kind of events is well-known. If you never heard of that – look at the interesting topics and the attendee list of more than one hundred people. You will have the opportunity to listen to the talks, to speak with interesting people and get some news from Eclipse Commiters and Users. In the end you usually get some food and bevereges, to make the atmosphere a little more relaxed. If you never been there it is worth to visit…

EWiTa 2009

EWiTa 2009 stands for Elmshorner Wirtschaftsinfromatiktag, that is German for “Elmshorn Business Information Systems Day”. The event has been organized by Frank Zimmermann, of Nordakademie – a private university in Northern Germany. Even if the event is not an official sequel of the MDSD Today, there were many similarities. The event had two tracks: the process modeling track and the MDSD track. After an excellent keynote from Mathias Weske about the importance of collaboration during the process of (business) modeling I stayed in the business track to listen to the Andrea Grass ( oose GmbH) on the combination of UML and BPMN 2.0. To say the truth, I’m not a big fan of this approach, especially, because the conceptual mismatch of modeling of business behavior and technical behavior. After a coffee break I enjoyed an excellent talk of itemis), reporting about the success story of xText in a big project of Deutsche Börse AG (German Stock Exchange).

After a small lunch, I was listening to two Arcando consultants reporting about their eTicketing project. The strange thing about this talk was that they just made some ads on a standard Microsoft product. After this, I enjoyed an interesting talk on business modeling based on CobIT process. Finally, I switched the track again to MDSD and listend to the an interesting usage of MDSD techniques for generation of DynPro and ABAP code.

In general I enjoyed the event. I think the MDSD track was a little more technical, but the combination was good.

Eclipse Summit Europe 2009

The Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 (ESE 2009) took place on October 27-29 in Ludwigsburg, Germany, it is the European complement to the EclipseCon in the US. In contrast to the spring event in Santa Clara, CA, the ESE is an autumn event in a beautiful baroque town near Stuttgart. The event lasted three days and is a must for Eclipse-related technology people. As usual, the venue was great, the keynotes excellent and the talks interesting. And of course it was the place to meet the committers, evangelists, see them in action, talk to them and discuss the future directions.

Symposium Day

The first day is an arrival day. People arrive during the day, some of them are already there. I was visiting the Modeling Track the whole day and had much fun with Ed Merks, Eike Stepper and Thomas Schindl in the morning. Later, in the Modeling Symposium, Eike showed the eDine RCP based on CDO, UBS envisioned the modeling tool pipeline and so on, and so on. About 10 people showed different technologies on and about modeling. Intersting, unstructured and relaxed. And of course, the first evening is the opportunity to speak with all the Eclipse VIPs and drink a cold beer.

First Day

The main conference day was Wednesday and it started with a great keynote on functional programming held by Don Syme, the father of F#. Suprisingly, the talk was about F#. For some of us, there was not enough functional beauty exposed in the talk, so I scheduled a private session with Don and he told Markus Voelter, Heiko Behrens and me about some interesting F# features.

I took part in the How about I/O session on JPicus. A very interesting tool for tracking I/O problems in Java programs developed by SAP. The Climb The Tower of Babel was about the Eclipse translation project. Intersting is the runtime editor allowing you to translate you runnig application. After a delicios lunch, I enjoyed two modeling talks: Xtext and EMF Query. The itemis team introduced some really new features, which make Xtext in my oppinion to a unique technology. Just to mention few of them: white-space aware parsing, usage of scopes and qualified names, usage of index (construted by a builder) in your own language, separation of markers and annotations in the editor, integration of the generator on-save, declarative quick-fix in your DSL, strings with special meaning, references to java types, and much more… The EMF Query is a project developed by the SAP team, that leverages the index by a query language. The language is a SQL-like DSL for querying the EMF-based models. The infrastructure is very intersting and allows complex scenarios with multiple model providers – very technical, and I believe, very interesting project.

Second Day

After the keynote on the importance of software ecosystems and a deep economical analysis of Eclipse ecosystem, I switched off the track to be able to prepare my talk. I was reporting about the IDE for TLA+ which I was building the last nine month at Microsoft Research, and which will be available soon. The main emphasis of the talk, was not the demo of the IDE, but the exchange of experiences on building one. Especially, I focused on the possible pitfalls and conceptual mismatches of IDEs depending on the integrated language. The slides will be available soon.

At the end, I enjoyed the event very much. I even liked it more than EclipseCon. Modeling still seems to be the most interesting part of Eclipse ecosystem. Technologies like Xtext and CDO gain maturity, new technolgoes like EMF Query are being developed. It was nice to see the people again… As usual, some pictures:

Galileo, or the JDT (Java Development Tools) to be more precisely, does not surprise with a load of stunning new features, instead, its a solid continuation of improvements. Concerning the JDT part, it has lost its pace of former days. But Eclipse JDT still is the reliable friend at your side, helping you code. This is a good thing, since Eclipse has been the IDE of choice for many, many Java programmers for a lot of years now and has grown to something like a “standard”. Its usability and reliability are well known and especially the first part has been constantly improved.

Galileo now draws its innovative power from the huge amount of different projects which were developed for it. The amount of tools for modeling is impressive. However it is not surprising, since modeling has become a sport in the past month. Consequently, it is bare logic to improve the tooling capabilities and quality. Galileo is following this path, not only because of Eclipse, but with what is available for it.

Code is poetry!

• What: Eclipse DemoCamp + Eclipse Stammtisch
• Where: Hotel East, Hamburg ( Simon-von-Utrecht-Str. 31, 20359 Hamburg, Germany)
• When: May 25th 2009, 18:00-21:00 (official part)

If you want to attend, make sure you find a minute to write you name down in EclipseWiki. I suppose these kind of events is well-known. If you never heard of that – I can only recomend to take part. You will have the opportunity to listen to the talks, to speak with interesting people and get some news from Eclipse Commiters and Users. In the end you usually get some food and bevereges, to make the atmosphere a little more relaxed. The location is a very descend place with wonderfull flair. If you never be there it is worth to visit…

This session will be interactive / openspace like. He will walk through the new EJB 3.1 APIs and explain some interesting stuff as well. It is the logical conduction of the first JUG HH session in May 2008.

Location: Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung (Hamburg Hauptbahnhof), Kurze Mühren 6, 20095 Hamburg

Date and Time: 16.09.2008, 20:00
Topic: Productive Java EE 6 – Rethinking Best Practices And Bashing On Patterns, Cluster One

Abstract: Java EE 6 is great, but many questions like:

• Are DAOs dead?
• Do JSF really suck?
• Are anemic JPA-entities a best practice?
• Are XML deployment descriptors legacy?
• Are EJBs lightweight?
• How to test EJBs?
• Is layering an antipattern?
• Do we need factories?
• How to integrate with RESTFul services?
• Is it possible to deploy EJBs into a …WAR?
• Are “plain old web containers” dead?
• Services or Objects – what is the way to go?

still remain open. These and many other questions will be discussed interactively with …code.

Speaker: Adam Bien

About the speaker: Java Champion Adam Bien is a self-employed consultant, lecturer, software architect, developer, and author in the enterprise Java sector in Germany who implements Java technology on a large scale. He is also the author of several books and articles on Java and J2EE technology, as well as distributed Java programming. His books include J2EE Patterns, J2EE HotSpots, Java EE 5 Architectures, Enterprise Architectures, Enterprise Java Frameworks, SOA Expert Knowledge, and Struts, all published in German.

As BEA technical director, Bien is also a member of the NetBeans Dream Team; an Expert Group member of the Java Community Process for EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, and Java EE 6; and involved in embedded Java, Grid, and P2P technology. He currently works as an architect and developer in several J2EE-Java EE Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and EAI component architecture projects for the Java EE platform and .NET.

Topic: Why Modularity is Important

When: September 9th, 2008, 19:00 CET, Registration required

Where: East Hotel Hamburg, Simon-von-Utrecht-Strasse 31, 20359 Hamburg / Germany

Abstract: Many developers are finding out that modularity has a significant influence on the development process. But unfortunately, Java has no concept of modularity, all JARs are placed on a linear classpath. Many projects have developed in-house plugin frameworks to achieve some modularity. The OSGi Service Platform is a standards based framework used by many projects. Some of the best known projects that use OSGi are Spring and Eclipse. There are many open source projects and commercial companies that have implemented the specifications: Apache Felix, Knopflerfish, Eclipse Foundation, ProSyst, IBM, Siemens, Hitachi, Samsung, etc. This presentation will analyze the problems with (the lack of) Java modularity and explain how OSGi provides many benefits for the development process as well as make the applications itself easier to maintain and extend.

Author: Peter Kriens

Details:

• When: Monday, September 1st, 19:00 CET
• Where: Roxie, Hamburg, Germany
• Directions: http://www.roxie-hamburg.com/roxieway.htm
• Who’s comming: Doodle Poll

See you next Monday.

The evening started with an interesting preview of Xtext 2.0 by Sven Efftinge (also itemis). Xtext 2.0 is rewritten from scratch and provides better performance than its predecessor. The current plan for release is about October 2008. The talk was followed by a presentation given by Matthias Lübken (akquinet it-agile) who demostrated how to use the google web toolkit (GWT) in conjunction with serverside Equinox framework. Matthias talked about some of the tweaks which are necessary in order to get the two working together and also showed a little live demo. He was followed by Stefan Reichert of Lufthansa Systems who introduced his ‘wicked shell’ for Eclipse. This handy tool started as tech-demo how to bind an external process to a SWT widget. Finally, it turned into a command line, shell, bash… integration for Eclipse – featuring code completion and history. Reginald Stadlbauer (CEO froglogic) showed how to automize GUI testing of GWT and other Java based GUIs using froglogics Squish. Squish offers scripting languages like Perl, Python or JavaScript to the user to automatize application gui testing. The tool, not an Eclipse application itself, is currently rewritten and will feature full Eclipse integration sometime soon. Finally, Frank Zimmermann (Prof. at the Nordakademie) and two of his students Stefan Tanck and Henning Banneitz showed how model-driven software development (MDSD) using oAWs XText can be used to generate adapters for SAP SI in order to transform EDIFACT messages to XML and back. Unfortunately, a talk about Spring dynamic modules with OSGi was not held, the presenter Gerd Wütherich (independant consulting) was ill.

Apart from the interesting talks, it was nice to see many familiar faces, which attended the Eclipse Demo Camp in Hamburg at the end of 2007. The Eclipse Demo Camp seems to build a community. Thanks to the organizers for enabling this great event.

Regarding the content, Adam focused on two main directions: the basic enterprise patterns and enterprise anti-patterns (this could be a good book title, btw.). General ideas, like support of DRY principle, convention over configuration and IoC, that are on my opinion the greatest achievements of Java EE 5 has been explained in a very plastic way. Especially, Adam really showed, that the bad-artifacts that made J2EE development boring disappeared in Java EE (or may be better to say: can be avoided). The last part of the talk was attended to the nonfunctional activities around the developed software. Adam focused on testing, management, monitoring, performance, etc… It was pretty interesting to see that Java EE community listens to the developer voices and push the technology towards modern, pragmatic and efficient programming platform.

During and after the session one could ask questions around the topics. Adam told a lot during the answers and proved again his excellent expertise in the Java in general and Java EE in particular. I really enjoyed the session and hope that the next one will not let us wait for several years again. Adam spoke about possible JavaFX session – this would be also very interesting.

( more photos in my photostream)