Ed Merks showed how to use EMF with the Google Web Toolkit. In about a click or two, he had an EMF-based GWT application (or an GWT-based EMF application) up and running. The famous library model application was not only available locally on his demo laptop but also hosted on Google Appspot. It is still available here. Unfortunately Ed did not refresh his running browser instance during the tutorial, although many model updates had been waiting on the server…;)

Ian Bull and Pascal Rapicault presented a bunch of donts concerning p2 in a very entertaining way. I hereby promise, I will no longer unzip features and plugins directly into an Eclipse instance, I will never release with the same version twice or try to edit the p2 metadata . Also throwing in 1000+ plugins into the dropin folder seems to be a discouraged practice, at least if you would like to have a speedy Eclipse startup. Seriously, this was a very informative presentation and it showed how to avoid “trouble” with p2, which is in many cases trouble that we caused ourselves.

In his keynote David Gondek explained the mission of Watson and how it works. Today keyword search is widely used, but it comes with the disadvantage of putting the burden of selecting “good” keywords on the user. In general adding more keywords to a search will decrease the quality of the results. Among many interesting statistics, I found the statistics on the top 10 “What is …?” searches in Google particularly interesting. On the first place is the question “What is love?”. Consequently the question “What is autism?” is on the 7th place . In contrast to keyword search, Watson uses a comprehensive analysis and reasoning to answer natural language questions. For example Watson has a geographic reasoner which can relate words in terms of the geographic distance. Thereby Watson can even find answers to tricky questions in Jeopardy. The many examples in the keynote provided a lively picture of the problems building the next generation search engine.

I shortly want to summarize my impressions from the EclipseCon yesterday (Monday):

Tutorial: What every developer needs to know about EMF. Since I was one of the authors I am not going to comment on the quality of the tutorial . About 80 people joint the tutorial and the number of participants did not decrease during the 3h tutorial. That should be a good sign. Jonas has blogged the contents of the tutorial here so no need to go into detail.

Efficient, Scalable Notification Handling for EMF. Listening to the changes of huge object graphs in EMF can be tricky, especially if you add adapters to many objects by many different listeners, which only trigger under certain conditions. Currently in EMF you can only register an adapter in general and you cannot specify conditions when the adapter should be notified. This can be a performance issue. The talk showed an event manager for EMF notifications which allows to register listeners including conditions when to notify the listeners. It is really cool that this component exists now, we have already partially developed custom solutions for this problem, now we can use this sophisticated implementation.

Tired of CVS? The talk presented how a streamlined work flow with Git, Gerrit, Mylyn and Hudson could look like. In the work flow a developer uses Mylyn to track requirements and tasks, EGit automatically manages change sets and committing to EGit automatically creates a code review in Gerrit and triggers a Hudson build. Looks like a beautiful new world to me!

Workshop: Tycho Build Conversion I tried to get the EMFStore build running with Tycho and Maven and it worked out pretty good. I did not get the build completed, but I had to leave after 1h. Overall I had the impression that building with Tycho could really be an option and I will definitely go and investigate this further. A good cheat sheet for converting an existing build to Tycho is available here.

Finally I went to the committer reception…meeting people and drinking beer .