Oomph Workshop: Eclipse the Way You Want It

Our Oomph Workshop at EclipseCon France is next Wednesday morning and Ed and I hope to see you there. We'll not only show you how to use Oomph's Eclipse Installer to provision ready-to-use IDEs and workspaces, we'll also teach you how to create setups for your own projects:

By submitting a functional setup for an Eclipse project
every EclipseCon participant can

Win a Spider Parrot Drone 

All you need is an Eclipse IDE with Oomph and our Author's Guide.

The challenge, of course, becomes easier if you attend our workshop. If you plan to do so, please download the following zip file and unzip it to an empty folder on your local disk:

oomph-workshop.zip

The zip file is giant (2.5 GB) because we've designed it to allow you to exercise the tutorial without network access, i.e., it includes some mirrors of p2 and Git repositories, as well as preconfigured installer executables for all platforms. To bootstrap the tutorial IDE follow these simple steps:

1. Go to the "installers" folder and launch the installer for your platform. If you are on Linux, please "chmod +x" your installer binary first!
   
   
2. If you run the installer the first time ever it might come up in simple mode. In this case please switch it to advanced mode:
   
   
3. In the advanced mode pick the "Eclipse IDE for Eclipse Committers" product and select the "Mars" version and click Next:
   
   
     
4. On the second installer page double-click the "Oomph Tutorial" project and verify that it's been added to the table at the bottom:
   
   
   
   
5. Confirm all following installer pages with Next or Finish. The tutorial IDE will be installed and started:
   
   

Now you're ready to participate. We're looking forward to meeting you in Toulouse!

Better Late Than Never

I wanted to remind you about the Call for Papers for the EclipseCon North America 2015 earlier, but the EclipseCon Europe, which just ended, has kept me too busy.

For San Francisco in March 2015 I hope that we can put together an interesting and funny program, too. And we need your help to make that possible. There are still two weeks left to submit your proposal.

If you submit now your proposal has the chance to be among the early bird picks!

Now that I've Got a Model – Where's My Application?

Models are efficient for capturing enterprise knowledge at a high level of abstraction, independent of technical concerns. Using the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) I can generate an Eclipse editor for my model on a click of a button and instantly play with it. Once I've iterated on the model I need to develop an application around it to put it to use. Now I realize that modeling didn't eliminate any technical aspects, it just relieved me from thinking about them early.

What about the background threads that are expected to cooperate nicely with my model? What if real data are magnitudes bigger than the data I've played with? How do I store this data and broadcast changes to the other users of my application? Can I prevent multiple users from accidentally modifying the same object? My application seems to disappear behind a curtain of challenges until I discover that the Connected Data Objects (CDO) framework provides me with a sophisticated platform for the technical aspects of my model.

In my EclipseCon presentation today I'll tell you how best to employ the runtime aspects of these frameworks to build a scalable, transactional and distributed application for your modeled data with little more than a mouse click.

The session will be in the Theatre from 10:30 to 11:30. I've prepared quite some gimmicks for you and I'm looking forward to seeing you there...

CDO Enters the 3rd Dimension

Update: The new room is 

Ballroom B+C

(not D, as in the printed schedule!)

EclipseCon is near and I'd like to invite you to attend Martin's and my talk CDO 3D on Monday shortly after lunch time.

As you may know or not, CDO is a runtime environment for distributed shared EMF models. Especially for organizations with huge models (e.g. the NASA, banks like the UBS AG, etc.) CDO is indispensible and has become sort of modeling mainstream in the past years.

Although I've always invested a lot into cool animated Powerpoint slides and although CDO comes with really new functionality each year, we've recognized a slight tendency of the conference audience to decide for parallel talks about completely new modeling technology, if they were forced to choose one. This fact (and the guy who shouted "next year we get Pixar Studios" after my last EclipseCon talk) has made me think about new ways of presenting a complex distributed technology. That's why this year's talk is titled "CDO 3D".

We will have no Powerpoint slides anymore but fully focus on real-time demos of a distributed system with a CDO model repository server and two CDO client applications. The client applications have RCP user interfaces, as well as a self-made scripting console that we will use to demo the API usage of CDO and the immediate influence of local CDO calls on the entire system.

In addition we've developed a 3D visualization frontend, that renders the contents and activities in multiple Java virtual machines into a 3D canvas in real-time. We've instrumented these VMs so that the frontend can even visualize the method calls between the Java objects and the network traffic between the VMs. This diagram outlines the basic architecture of our presentation system:

If you're still asking yourself "What the hell is he talking about?" watch this short video:

(click here for watching a larger video)

Of course we'll also talk about some of the cool new features in CDO 4.0 like OCL queries, Blobs and Clobs, cross referencing and referential integrity checks, fail-over cluster and the brand new backend integration with MongoDB. I'm looking forward to see you in Santa Clara!