TechJava

The vacation time of most people is over, so it is time to meet and discuss a little. A good opportunity to do this will be given on September 1st in Roxie, Hamburg during the Eclipse Stammtisch. The event name translates into regular’s table and indicates a regularity of the happening. Even if the upcoming event is only the second in series I expect to meet many people after the great feedback after the last one.

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 Java User Group Hamburg (JUG-HH) organizes another event at Lehmanns Bookstore in Hamburg. This time the subject of the talk is build management and project automation with help of an open-source tool called Maven. Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project’s build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.

On June 16th another Eclipse Demo Camp took place in Hamburg. Organized by Peter Friese of itemis and Martin Lippert of it-agile, Eclipse enthusiasts and presenters met in a former coffee exchange in the harbor of Hamburg, the so called “Hafencity”.

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.

Yesterday, the first “Eclipse Stammtisch Hamburg” took place in Bolero in Ottensen. It was a full success, about 50 people were there. I was glad to see people I known from Eclipse Democamp again. I liked the location, having a separated room, big enough for another 50 people. I spoke with Ralph on the intended frequency of the event – it could be good to have it four times a year.
The rest of the pictures can be seen in my FlickR gallery.