Springs have never been this good as this year’s edition was. Santa Clara was my place to be and EclipseCon it had to be. Other than travelling for 27 hrs, 2 hrs queue handling at Los Angeles airport and the 12hrs jetlag, it was a fascinating experience.
This time SAP had a huge presence at Santa Clara with 12 talks or tutorial being given by SAP employees. It clearly signals the increased presence and contribution of SAP towards Eclipse and Open source over the last few years.
In this post I will list down the major highlights of each day in brief. Please note most of the sessions refer to my area of interest which may not be of major importance to some one else. My focus area in this EclipseCon was EMF related topics and Eclipse developer infrastructure like Mylyn, GIT etc.
21st Monday highlights: The conference kicked off with the tutorials. I was a speaker for one of them. The EMF tutorial had almost a full attendance. We saw the basics of EMF being covered in the tutorial and then the other important relevant technologies of EMF were showcased.
Axel showed his EventManager component which I feel could be a very vital component in the core of EMF. This component provides filter mechanisms for the EMF events. These Event filters can be complex Boolean expressions over basic filters such as for specific attributes, references or type of notifier/new/old value.
More details here http://www.eclipsecon.org/2011/sessions/?page=sessions&id=2146
EMF-BI bridge was the part missing in BIRT for long time. It is actually BI connecting to the EMF models. Tradescape Inc. has developed a new Ecore ODA driver which helps BIRT to produce charts from the EMF models.
More details here http://www.eclipsecon.org/2011/sessions/?page=sessions&id=2028
Eike and Martin astonished everyone with their talk of CDO 3D.They made us visualize CDO in the 3D world. They showed us the key and new features of CDO.More details here on Eike’s blog
http://thegordian.blogspot.com/2011/03/cdo-enters-3rd-dimension.html
22nd Tuesday highlights:
Next day started with a hilarious keynote of What Watson is and what can it do. Watson or DeepQA is a computer which can rapidly and accurately answer open domain questions
Fredric Madiot of Modisco project showed how large models can be browsed in the Modisco model browser. The models can be further queried using Java or OCL .
Check Modisco project here http://www.eclipse.org/MoDisco/
Mylyn Intent is a hot new project proposed by Obeo.I found this project very interesting and innovative. It couples your documentation with the code. It derives from a concept called literate programming.
More illustrations of Mylyn Intent here http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/mylyn.docs.intent/
Ed Merks showed how GWT applications can be developed in a snap. You just need to have the GWT based eclipse plug-ins and need to change one genmodel property to GWT to generate the GWT based EMF code.
Check for more details here http://wiki.eclipse.org/EMF/GWT
23rd Wednesday highlights:
Java renaissance and revitalization happened at the EclipseCon also. I mean there was a keynote jointly given by Java gurus of IBM and Oracle. They talked how both of these java conglomerates are shaping up the future of Java through the OpenJDK specification.
EMFPath is a Google code hosted project. I found this small project very interesting. Google Guava library provides you some cool collection APIs to filter and transform your objects.EMF Path uses the Google Guava library to generate EMF APIs which helps to navigate the models very easily with very less number of lines of code.
Check more of the project here http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/emfpath/
Ian Bull and Pascal Raspault gave a hilarious and informative session on P2.Seriously they should try doing standup comedy. They showed the common mistakes people do while using p2 repository and how without properly analyzing the bugs are raised against P2.
24th Thursday highlights:
Thursday started with a keynote session by Todd Lipclon on Apache Hadoop .He told what Hadoop is, how HDFS provides high throughput access to application data. He also showed the other subprojects within Hadoop.
XText was certainly one of the hottest topics of the event. Even the organizers had to change the room as the number of participants grew for the tutorial. Sven Effinge and his team introduced the new expression based language called XBase which helps you to embed expressions in your DSL.
Check more on XText here http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/
Martin Fluegge showed Dawn which is a collaborative way to work on your User interfaces for EMF models which are stored in the CDO repository. For e.g. it provides collaborative access for GMF diagrams. It also provides a web viewer which allows to view diagram change online.
Catch Dawn here http://wiki.eclipse.org/Dawn
Curtains over EclipseCon were again drawn with a very exciting closing panel. Closing panel consisted of all the leads of the top level eclipse projects. They were asked to mention few words about the most important features of their projects in the upcoming Indigo release. Closing panel also showcased the most important facts like how many gallons of beer were drank or how many inches of rain poured over California that week.
Definitely these four days of March were my one of the most technically enriching days of my life.
