2010-12-04

The Eclipse DemoCamp i Copenhagen

Outside it was very cold and dark last night, but inside the IBM's building on Østerbro in Copenhagen, it was warm and nice. And we had lots of coffee and sandwiches (Thanks to the Rational Software group of IBM Danmark), so everybody was content. And after all, the presentations was all pretty good too.


[You can find links to all slides at eclipse.dk]

Android Development in Eclipse by Ronni Kahalani
First, Ronni Kahalani talked about Android development in Eclipse. He went out to buy a simple and cheap phone that could just ring, for 40$, but ended up with something else, the Android 2.2 based Samsung Galaxy 9000 S - which made the start of his Android development era and life got a hole lot more interesting.
Now Ronni wanted to create some interesting applications and he described exactly what you need to do to implement a simple application for Android.

The example was a very small, yet quite impressive, a quick SMS (SMS Now) application that could send predefined SMS's (Text message) to any contact... It was quite impressive to see the code behind the application as well as how the application was debugged... (As a side note, quite a few of the participants from the demo camp would like to participate in the upcoming Android tutorial day).

UI Bindings - a UI framework for EMF based applications by Tonny Madsen
Tonny Madsen talked about an open source Java based framework used to ease the generation of the user interface (editors, views, wizards, etc) for large applications based on EMF models. The idea is to avoid all the boilerplate code to ensure a consistent and complete UI, but yet have the full power of Java available for the UI generation. Many other resent alternatives uses large amount of XML but does not have the same flexibility.

IBM Rational Team Concert by Morten Madsen
Morten Madsen presented some of the possibilities of the free edition of Jazz and Rational Team Concert. He focused on the way a developer will see the the world when using these tools. We will definitely need a shoot-out between Jazz on one side and Mylyn and Git or Mercurial on the other side... Maybe some future arrangement... For now we will arrange a Jazz tutorial day... (and a Mylyn arrangement as well in the srping...)

Developing an IDE for testing services and mainframe applications by Steen Brahe
Steen Brahe talked about a test framework, he has developed in his job at Danske Bank.
The test framework is used for unit tests of PL/1, COBOL and web services developed in the bank. No commercial tools for PL/1 or COBOL exist and only few tools for web services can be found. Steen demonstrated the tool against the live test system of the bank and it was quite impressive.

Eclipse e4 - Status and the Future by Tonny Madsen
Tonny Madsen then returned to talk about the current status of the Eclipse e4 project as well as the status of the current Eclipse 4.2M3 release. The new release is quite snappy and holds a lot of promise to future RCP applications. Whether it means anything for the IDE is a question nobody can yet answer.

Eclipse e4 and CSS styling by Ronni Kahalani
Then Ronni Kahalani returned on stage to talk about the CSS capabilities of Eclipse e4 based applications. After a small introduction to CSS technologies, Ronni illustrated how the code works in a smal sample application.

Building with Tycho by Maksim Sorokin and Johannes Serup
Last on the agenda was Maksim Sorokin and Johannes Serup to talk about how they use Maven and Tycho in their company, 3Dfacto. They first presented Maven and how Maven is traditionally used. They then introduced Tycho and told how Tycho can be used to build Eclipse plug-ins via the Maven build system. We probably have to look into Type to see whether it can help.... 

2010-12-02

Looking forward for EcliopseCon 2011

Now that Chris Aniszczyk and all his fellow program committee members have forced us to submit our ideas for the program of the next EclipseCon, I cannot help wonder..

Whether we will see the return of the chocolate fountain?
By Boris Bokowski

Whether the bar will be just as crowded as last year?
By Anne Jacko

What will ruin the night this time?
By Anne Jacko