November is over now and last week I attended the last DemoCamp for the year. In this year’s November DemoCamp series I spoke at three events and with this post I’d like to present you with some impressions.

Bonn, November 16th: The beginning…

It was the first DemoCamp that was located in Bonn ever. So, as a result of this the audience was not very big, although at least 40 people found their way to the demos. I was already familiar with most of the talks.  I’d seen both Marcel Bruch’s talk on the Code Recommenders project and Mathias Sohn’s talk about EGit before, but they are still interesting. Besides these talks, one highlight was the talk about Xtext from Karsten Thoms which I hadn’t seen before in this form. He demonstrated how easy it is to create a DSL with Xtext. It’s fantastic what people can do with Eclipse technology.

Afterwards we all met at the Stammtisch. The bad thing was that Ralph Müller had to leave the talks early because he wasn’t feeling well. (Just a note here that he left before the RAP talk, so it wasn’t the talk that made him sick)

München, November 23rd: Party time…

For me it was the first time speaking at the annual DemoCamp in Munich. The organizers are well known Eclipse folks: Jonas Helming, Maximilian Koegel and Ekke. The cool thing was that these guys were so good at publicizing the camp that 100 people decided to spend an evening watching the demos. One thing that I missed was the talk by Marcel Bruch. Marcel where were you? Despite Marcel being missing, there were some really good talks. Two examples are the e4 talk by Tom Schindl and the Mylyn talk by Benjamin Muskalla. Of course both talks have been given before but I still recommend listening to them. They’re great speakers. Of course the RAP talk was another highlight

To put it all in a nutshell Munich was one of the best DemoCamps ever.  It had a very friendly atmosphere with beer service during the talks (thanks Jonas) and a great Stammtisch afterwards. But once more Ralph missed it so I had to pay for my own.

Karlsruhe, December 9th: The return of Ralph…

The last DemoCamp I visited in this series was the Karlsruhe DemoCamp last week. And guess what?  Marcel Bruch was speaking there. Why was I not surprised ? In addition to his talk, there was a world premiere in the form of Markus Tiede from Bredex presenting Jubula, one of the most recently created Eclipse projects. It was really fun to watch the IDE program by itself. Some other good talks were given by Benjamin Muskalla and Karsten Thoms. I saw Karsten in Bonn and the good thing was, that he presented two different talks. Its really nice to see that some people invest the time to provide fresh talks to the audience. I think I need to create a new talk too

The same as with the other camps, there was a Stammtisch afterwards. And surprisingly Ralph Müller was there too. So, the first round was on the Eclipse Foundation. Thanks Eclipse Foundation! I’m sure he came because he wanted to give his 6 democamps tour a nice finish. Hope to see you on more Stammtisch’s next year, Ralph.

To sum up, it was a great month with a lot of traveling. I met a lot of nice people that are all involved in Eclipse in their own way:  some as IDE users, some as contributors, some Foundation folks and a few committers – the ecosystem in its pure form. So, I hope to see some of you again at EclipseCon next year where I hope I’ll also be able to show you Eclipse RTP.

Tags: democamp, e4, eclipse, jubula, rap, redview, tycho, xtext

One thing I like about November is the DemoCamps, and this year I spoke at two of them, Bonn and Munich. Both were great events where I had the chance to talk  about RAP. The DemoCamps are all about spreading the word about technology and both events did a great job. November is nearly over, but you will have a second chance on December 9th to see some great speakers like Ralph Müller, Marcel Bruch, Benjamin Muskalla, Karsten Thoms, Klaus Krogmann, Markus Tiede, Stefan Schuerle and David Burkhart. Of course you’ll also hear me speaking about RAP again.

If you are in or around Karlsruhe feel free to stop by. All you need to do is sign up for each of the events: the democamp (sign up on eventbrite) and for the Stammtisch afterwards (sign up on doodle). But you have to be fast because there are only a few seats left. Here is the complete agenda for the Karlsruhe DemoCamp on December 9th.  Looking forward to meeting you there.

• 17:30 – 17:40 Intro – Ralph Mueller
• 17:40 – 18:00 From Stack Trace to Scrum: Agile development with Mylyn, Benjamin Muskalla, Tasktop
• 18:00 – 18:20 Balanced Software Design, Klaus Krogmann, FZI
• 18:20 – 18:40 Agile Development with Eclipse, Stefan Schuerle and David Burkhart, andrena
• 18:40 – 19:00 Eclipse Code Recommenders, Marcel Bruch, TU Darmstadt
• 19:00 – 19:30 break
• 19:30 – 19:50 Jubula- take a sneak peak, Markus Tiede, Bredex
• 19:50 – 20:10 A look ahead at RAP: what’s new now and will be noteworthy in the future, Holger Staudacher, EclipseSource
• 20:10 – 20:30 Building Xtext based projects with Maven, Karsten Thoms, itemis AG

Tags: Agile, Code recommenders, democamp, eclipse, jubula, karlsruhe, mylyn, rap, xtext

First, they are all Eclipse projects. But I think you already knew this. The second thing they have in common is that they are all part of the Eclipse Stammtisch on September 15th in Karlsruhe (Germany). It’s an honor to announce that all these projects will be presented by top developers who play an important role in their projects.   I would believe that until the Eclipse Summit Europe this will be the last chance to hear this many first class talks. If you are in or around Karlsruhe on September 15th feel free to join us and take the opportunity to see all the mentioned technologies in action.

Who’s speaking at the Stammtisch?

• The first talk will be an introduction by Ralph Müller. If you know Ralph you also know that this will be very interesting and you will learn something new about the Eclipse Foundation.
• After Ralph, Matthias Sohn and Stefan Lay from SAP will start the technical talks with an overview of the EGit project. Egit is an Eclipse team provider for the popular git version control system. I had the opportunity to hear their talk in Mannheim a week ago -  it’s definitely worth to listening to.
• The third talk will be about p2, the Eclipse provisioning technology.  Ian Bull is coming all the way from Canada – so its a special chance to meet Ian live.
• The next speaker isn’t traveling thousands, but hundreds of kilometers to the Stammtisch. Peter Friese is travelling from Hamburg (Germany) to Karlsruhe and will provide a great talk about Xtext.
• Andreas Hoegger has agreed to present a very young Eclipse project called Scout. To get you familiar with this application framework Andreas will travel from Zürich (Switzerland) to Karlsruhe.
• Last but not least Benjamin Muskalla will hold the last talk. To round out the evening, he’ll speak about the integration of other Eclipse projects with RAP.

How much does it cost?

• Attending the talks is all for free.
• But I think the speakers will appreciate a frosty beverage donation after the Stammtisch.

What do you have to do to attend the Stammtisch?

• First of all you need to read the information on the EclipseSource Stammtisch website.
• After this you can add yourself to the doodle for the Stammtisch. Please let us know if you are coming. Only this makes it possible to organize the event well.

I think this will be a unique opportunity to see these talks in the casual atmosphere of a Stammtisch. Thanks in advance to all speakers for agreeing to participate and for making this evening possible. It’s a great honor to have you all in Karlsruhe.

After the talks we will all go over to a small Italian restaurant and talk about the topics over a frosty beverage. You are free to join this round and network with the speakers and audience. If you’re not able to attend the Stammtisch you also have a second chance. I think all of the speakers submitted a proposal for the Eclipse Summit Europe. You can attend this event by following the steps described here.

Looking forward to meeting you at the Stammtisch. I will also be there and try to answer questions about RAP

Tags: egit, p2, rap, Scout, stammtisch, xtext

The show is over …

With a crowd of almost 200 attendees, many cool demos and the right weather for beer and pretzels… this was not only one of the biggest DemoCamps ever, it also was a lot of fun!

First I’d thank all the other speakers for their great contributions:

1. Hervé Couturier (SAP AG): Welcome
2. Ralph Mueller (Eclipse Foundation): Welcome
3. Krum Tsvetkov (SAP AG), Benjamin Muskalla (EclipseSource): Memory Analyzer & RAP – Single Sourcing in Practice (Demo Slides)
4. Michael Scharf (Wind River): A new View on Tables — a flexible framework to show tabular data in SWT Tables and Trees
5. Achim Demelt (eXXcellent solutions): Modeling is fun!
6. Jochen Hiller (Deutsche Telekom AG): Dynamic OSGi application using Equinox
7. Elmar Eperiesi-Beck (CORISECIO): Equinox based SOA Security Framework – a future Eclipse Project
8. Gunnar Wagenknecht (AGETO): Equinox on Servers – An introduction to the Eclipse Gyrex project
9. Marcus Harringer (MicroDoc GmbH): Virtual Embedded Devices with OSGi, Eclipse and Flash
10. Guy Philipp Bollbach (itemis): TMF Xtext: a self-experiment

During the evening, many photos were taken and some of the talks were even recorded on video.

The demo camp was introduced by Hervé Couturier and Ralph Mueller. They talked about SAP’s commitments to the Eclipse community and the growing level of participation.

After the introduction, Krum Tsvetkov gave a quick overview of the Eclipse Memory analyzer (MAT) and how you can use it to find memory leaks within 5 minutes. After the crowd understood what MAT is, I showed them how easy it is to have the same application running in the web by exchanging the runtime. Most of the people were quite impressed and it reminded me of what Chris once said: “Cool, one runtime to rule them all”. I’ll blog about the results of single sourcing MAT in the upcoming days so – in the meantime you can watch our talk.

Next Michael Scharf showed a small framework for handling tabular data on top of the existing JFace infrastructure that uses a columns-based approach instead of the existing row-based one. I hope they will consider contributing it to the community!

Achim Demelt gave us a fuzzy warm feelings about modeling with his demo “Modeling is fun!” He showed us some cool extensions to graphical editors like content assistance and compile/generate on save.

After a short break, Jochen Hiller showed us the power of dynamic OSGi systems. He did a demo on how to run some bundles and use several different bundle versions in parallel.

Elmar Eperiesi-Beck showed us a possible future Eclipse project – an Equinox based SOA Security Framework. He demonstrated how to secure a SOA application. With this approach he mentioned several times that Corisecio wants to contribute this project back to the Eclipse ecosystem (hope to see the proposal soon).

One new Eclipse project demonstrated was Gyrex. Gunnar gave us a quick introduction of the project. Gyrex provides a set of frameworks and tools around Equinox to allow seamless and pain-free operation of Equinox server clusters. Sounds pretty cool but we still need to “Stay tuned… they are working on an example for you to play with”.

Marcus Harringer of MicroDoc showed us an example of how to combine some of the cool kids of todays technology stack. They emulated real world devices like a turnstile with the help of Equinox and Flash for the client side. They used the emulation to write test scripts to create functional tests for their software implementions of the devices. Pretty cool demo on combining different technologies to solve real world problems.

The last but not least speaker was Guy Philipp Bollbach of itemis talking about Xtext. I think Xtext is one of the really cool technologies we have today. It helps you to write a grammar for your own DSL and let Xtext generate the whole stack of editors, outline views and other things like content assist for your DSL.  Really impressive!

All in all it was a really nice evening – most of the people I talked to had a great evening and learned about many cool Eclipse technologies. Most of the attendees enjoyed the democamp as much as I did. I hope to see some of you at the next DemoCamp or at a Stammtisch.

And as always – the Twitter community was very active during the DemoCamp – see all the related tweets @eventtrack.

Tags: democamp, eclipse, equinox, galileo, modeling, OSGi, rap, xtext