Eclipse Democamp in Copenhagen

eclipse.dk will have our first ever DemoCamp in Copenhagen on 10. December.

IBM (at Lyngbyvej 2, 2100 KBH Ø by the Chokolade Frog) has provided the space for the event so we still have room for more people.

The current presentations for the DemoCamp are very diverse:

1. Tonny Madsen, The RCP Company, What exactly is the new e4
2. Jesper Steen Møller, XPath2, XML Catalog and XSLT tooling
3. Bent Agervold Jensen, ReportSoft, BIRT
4. Mikkel Heisterberg, Intravision, Signed plugins and how these works end-to-end in Lotus Notes
5. Jakob Lyng Petersen, Maconomy, Building a Generic Client for Business Professionals using Eclipse RCP
6. Ekkart Kindler, DTU, Model-based Software Engineering with the Eclipse Modeling Framework
7. Steen Brahe, Danske Bank, Use of the Graphical Modeling Framework in Danske Bank
8. Jan Schoubo, LEJLN platformen - Linux-Eclipse-Java-LEGO NXT - For absolute beginners 

If you want to participate, update the wiki page at eclipse.org or mail me on formand@eclipse.dk.

And yes, we do have space for one or two presentations more...

Learning more about Eclipse plug-in development...

As part of the Eclipse Foundation Training series, there are scheduled 5 classes on "Advanced Eclipse RCP".

This is the perfect class for people, who have developed Eclipse plug-ins for the last year or so and now wants to know more about some of the more advanced subjects in Eclipse plug-in development.

The title of the classes is "Advanced RCP Eclipse", but with the exception of one subject, all the subjects of the class are just as relevant if you're developing Eclipse plug-ins for the IDE.


Amoung the subjects we will teach in the classes are:

• Wizards - which is basically here because we don't have time for this subject during "Development in Eclipse RCP".
  
• Long-Running operations and Jobs and how to make the interaction between these and the UI as painless as possible.
  
• How to use Eclipse Adapters. While the Adapter framework arguably is one of the more difficult to understand and use properly, the is also a framework that will solve many of the problems you might face is larger non-trivial applications especially when used in conjunction with the menus extension point and handlers.
• The Data Binding framework and how to use this to cut down on the boilerplate code in the application.
• How to handle virtual trees and tables when either the amount of data is large or the retrieval time is long for items in the tree or table.
• How to declare and implement your own extension points. Not that this is especially difficult, but there are a number of god design patterns around this that can help reduce the code involved and also make your application react properly when plug-ins are either added or removed from the running aplication.
• How to do head less builds using PDEBuild, which probably is not of the most troublesome subjects in Eclipse. One day it works, then next it don't...
  

You can see the complete list of subjects in these classes and where to attend of the classes on the training page.

Although the page on the training says "Prerequisites: Solid Java experience, experience with Eclipse SDK as a Java development environment and notions of Eclipse RCP", I know from past experience that mere notions will make for very hard three days. In the classes we assume you know about commands, views, perspectives, etc - basically the subjects from the "Development in Eclipse RCP".

If you have been developing Eclipse plug-ins for some time, this just might be the next class for you...

Running is good...

...between the fine meals and many interesting talks... and the plenty beers in the evening.

I always try to attend the different runs that usually are part of all the technical conferences including Eclipse Summit Europe and EclipseCon. Not only because, you need them after long - and often interesting - talks in the evening - possibly with a few beer - but more so because the runs are very good chances of meeting people you would not necessarily talk with otherwise.

Today it was easy 5 km through some of the trails around the hotel. As Ludwigsburg is build on a small hill, it was quite interesting at times.

So a big thanks to our big leader, Chris Aniszczyk, for hosting the runs. And come and join the run tomorrow at 7:00 in the hall of the Nestor Hotel..

Teaching MDD and DSLs at ITU, Copenhagen

This fall I have accepted a position as extern lecturer at the IT University in Copenhagen teaching model driven development and domain specific languages. I share the position with Steen Brahe from Danske Bank - one of the major banks in Denmark - who have a very solid practical experience in GMF models.

The class runs every Monday and is a required part of the Master degree on software construction at ITU.

As the tool bench for the classes, we use Eclipse Galileo Modeling Tools, which have turned out be a very good choice as a platform, as it is both pretty solid and contains all the bits and pieces we need in the classes.

The IT University is a rather interesting place - not only from an architectural point of view - see the picture at the right - but also because the students are required to hold a bachelor degree as well as at least two years of real practical experience. This later requirement means, most of the students actually have a qualified opinion about the subjects that is taught.

The classes we teach includes the following subjects:

• OSGi
• Basic Eclipse Plug-in Structure
• MDD Theory
• EMF
• OCL
• Textual DSL design an theory
• XText
• GMF
• Model Transformations
• QVT
• Xpand
• and a number of lectures on alternatives like UML

As it can be seen, this a very mixed bag with both theory and lots of practical exercises based on the Eclipse tool bench.

EclipseCon '09: UI Bindings: Slides and notes

I just finished my presentation on UI Bindings, a framework that can help you getting a more consistent UI in large applications with many views based on an EMF model.

The presentation was co-hosted with Olivier Moises - talking about Wazaabi - and Thomas Schindl - talking about UFaceKit. It was rather interesting to compare the different approaches...

I have uploaded the slides and you can find them on gpublication.com.

Please note that UI Bindings is released under the EPL license and can be found at Google code - for the time being...

Screen Flows support released

It took a while longer than promised, but now I am happy to release the screen flow implementation I talked about at Eclipse Summit Europe '08 to the public.

Just go to http://code.google.com/p/screen-flows-in-eclipse/ and you should find both the presentation as well as all the needed sources. If you find any problems with the implementation or just find a way to enhance them, then please free to submit your changes.

Ask the experts

We have just finished our Advanced Eclipse RCP training in Copenhagen. All-in-all a success with one "minor" problem: we had far too much materials for a three day course. It could easily have been a four day course.

One very good thing we did in this course was to get Thomas Hallgren to present Buckminster. Thomas, being one of he main developers of Buckminster, could answer all the many questions there was on building plug-ins and products in Eclipse. This is definitely something, we would consider doing again another time. I think almost everybody present wanted to go home a play a little more with Buchminster.

Don't forget your running shoes... if you feel blue

For those of you that feel a little run in the morning is a good cure for any blues - or simply fear that all the hard late work will warrant it - there will be a short 5-6 km tun in the morning starting from the entrance of Hotel Nestor.

Just be there by 7:20 and we will take a slow scroll around the parks of the center of Ludwigsburg. Any ideas for good routes will be much appreciated.

See you Tuesday morning!