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!

ESE '08: Please provide a proper calendar

In the Spring at EclipseCon '08, there was a iCal based calendar with all the events and sessions of the conference. That was very useful when you wanted to figure out just what to attend to. The fact that it was in iCal format made it possible to synchronize to many types of devices - such as mobile phones - as well as Google Calendar...

But for ESE '08, I cannot find a calendar with the sessions. Just the one made by Bjørn - it seems - with three entries: "Symposia", "Day 1" and "Day 2". It is linked to from the front page of ESE '08, so one can only assume that it was the intension to add more stuff... or not?

If a calendar with all the events and sessions exists, can anybody point me to it?

ESE '08: Will there be any organized runs this year?

I have been looking for some time now, but as I cannot find anything, I have to ask: Will there be any organized runs this year at Eclipse Summit Europe?

With all the good food and the many sessions where we all sit and listen, a little run or two would do us all good.

Meet Wayne Beaton in Denmark

Wayne - our most esteemed evangelist - will talk at a after-work meeting for eclipse.dk in Copenhagen on Thursday. The subject - apart from whatever you ask him - will be test driven development:

Test first development is a top-down process by which code is written starting with tests. Once tests have been created, the process changes to that of making the tests work by implementing the application code. In this short talk, we demonstrate how Eclipse support for JUnit facilitates test first development in the context of creating Java and Java EE applications, and plug-ins.

If you would like to participate, the meeting is taking place at ITU (Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 5.sal, 2300 København S) Thursday 16:00-18:30. Please sign up at eclipse.dk.