Eclipse Demo Camp in Berlin

Last week I was at the Eclipse Demo Camp in Berlin, my home town in Germany. This was my second demo camp so I was curious how it would compare to the one I visited early this year in Bern, Switzerland.

Berlin photos of my friend Andreas Mösching

It turned out that they were quite similar. A lot of very interesting presentations coupled with a delicious buffet. Another similarity was the presenters' tendency to completely over-estimate their talking time. I remember that my talk at the EclipseCon 2008 also suffered from this a lot. I think I learned from it and I planned to talk only 15 of my 30 minutes and leave the rest for discussion.

The "Deutsche Dom" (main cathedral in Berlin)

My talk about the CDO Model Repository was the first one in a sequence of eight. Fortunately I managed to show my three architecture slides in 10 minutes, followed by a live demo of another 10 minutes. The rest of the time was dedicated to a lot of questions and answers. Very informative for me and the audience. Thank you!

CDO Architecture

After me Tom Ritter from the Fraunhofer Institut described their ModelBus effort. It reminded me slightly to what I saw in TopcaseD framework and indeed Tom talked about a former cooperation. I wonder if somebody would be interested in evaluating ways to integrate CDO with their ModelBus...

ModelBus

Then Volker Wegert from Siemens had a handicap while showing his SAP R/3 Connector for Eclipse RCP Applications: none of the attendees ever faced SAP back-ends. Nevertheless he managed to make it interesting!

SAP R/3 Connector for Eclipse RCP Applications

Very interesting was Jens von Pilgrim's demo of GEF3D. I was amazed to see what they're able to do with 2D user interfaces! With a handful of code changes they turn an ordinary class diagram editor into a multi-layered 3D editor with connections between the layers and so much more. Amazing. And Jens is a collegue of my new CDO committer Stefan Winkler, so I guess I'll hear from him in the future.

Gef3D

Enrico Schnepel explained us how to use GenGMF to ease the development of GMF editors for large metamodels. I also always thought that the GMF's diagram configuration models are so flexible that they fail to easily support the 95 percent cases. Could be worth a look at GenGMF...

GenGMF

One of the talks was not on the agenda so unfortunately I can not remember the name of the student who showed a demo of his distributed shared model editing framework on top of EMF (or GMF?). In his talk he explained that he investigated CDO and found it inappropriate due to the lack of offline support. What a pity that he did not take the time to contact the CDO team. We are currently investigating ways to provide more disconnected modes of model sharing and it would have been so much nicer to co-operate rather than duplicate efforts! I'd appreciate very much his work in the CDO project and he agreed to consider this. Ed, didn't you mention recently how much you enjoy seeing our team grow and prosper? :P

Shared editing in GMF diagrams

Theofanis Vassiliou-Gioles demonstrated their TTworkbench - an extensible Eclipse based test environment - in a very detailed way. I felt like a trainee...

Buffet between the talks

Stephan Herrmann from the TU Berlin gave the last talk: Plugin reuse and adaptation with Object Teams: Don't settle for a compromise! It looked a bit like an alternative approach to AspectJ and his examples were nearly as amazing as the ones at the ESE talk about Equinox Aspects. I must admit that I'm a bit scared about the security implications about such major changes to published and deployed code, un-anticipated by their providers. But it's clear that many things can be achieved with it that were impossible without.

Object Teams

The demo camp started at 6 p.m. and now it was already far past 10. Only two short breaks so most of us looked a bit tired already and I also decided to go home. For future demo camps I would really limit the presentation time to 15 minutes per talk and allow for discussion afterwards. It should be clear that a demo camp is not a training where we should learn the last detail of a tool or technology. It should create interest and the wish to dig deeper back at home.

The Fernsehturm in Berlin