Retrospect: DemoCamp in Berlin

Yesterday I attended the Eclipse DemoCamp in Berlin. It took place at Fraunhofer Fokus, and (as the last democamps) it was organized by Tom Ritter (thank you, Tom!). This time, there were ten (10!) presentations, seems as if we should organize a DemoDay next time. The camp started with a nice welcome talk by Ralph Müller, encouraging the audience to become Eclipse members (I will talk with my employer about that, promised ;-) ) and visit Eclipse Summit Europe (I won't miss it). Kristian Duske (committer on the GEF3D project) presented a "GEF3D Based Editor for the GMF Mapping Model", which was the subject of his diploma thesis. His editor enables the creation and editing of the GMF mapping model using simple drag-and-drop mouse operations. In contrast to the tree-based GMF editors, all involved models are visualized in a graphical manner, and since all models are visualized in a single 3D scene, inter-model-connections are visible, too. I really like the idea and his presentation, but since I was his tutor, I'm not really an impartial observer ;-)

Fig 1: Kristian's 3D GMF Mapping Editor

Martin Esser then demonstrated a small editor he has created with GMF (unfortunately without Kristian's 3D editor ;-) ) for variability models (aka feature diagrams). The challenge is to implement these arcs connecting edges of optional or alternative features. I usually draw these diagrams using OmniGraffle, and although there is a stencil for these diagrams available, it is painful to adjust these arcs -- a GMF based editor would be a great help. Maybe Kang et al designed these diagrams in order to test the abilities of programmers of graphical editors... (BTW, I just stumbled over this Eclipse project proposal, they want to provide a graphical editor as well) It seems as if there is an Xtext presentation at every democamp ;-), and of course there was a talk about it in Berlin, too. Peter Friese gave a short overview of this really nice tool for creating editors (and more) for textual DSLs. I have attend a couple of Xtext presentations (e.g. at ESE 2008 and 2009), and although all these presentations used different slides and were presented by different persons, the slides are always magnificent (with great photos and nicely illustrated). Maybe they have an Xtext based tool for generating these slides... hmm... Ralph Müller mentioned something about Ytext in his keynote, maybe this is a new tool for generating presentations? After a short break (with Eclipse sponsored sandwiches and soft drinks ;-)), Marcus Engelhardt demonstrated a tool called Metrino for measuring models. Metrics can be defined using OCL for UML or Ecore based DSLs, and the tool creates nice reports and radar charts. IMHO model metrics are an important tool for modelers, and I always have the plan to create tool with GEF3D in order to display the metrics on top of the diagrams (using the city metaphor) as illustrated in Figure 2... Marcus, if you'd like to combine that with Metrino, I would be happy to assist you!

Fig. 2: Visualization of metrics with GEF3D

Joachim Hänsel and Jaroslav Svacina introduced their tool EvoTest for creating tests automatically with evolutionary techniques. I know that tests are very important, but (shame on me) I'm neither an expert for testing nor for evolutionary techniques. However, their tool looks very interesting, and I was impressed by the ability of that tool to generate white box tests considering path coverage. Next, Martin Köster talked (slides are available here) about how he created an Eclipse based IDE for the Clojure language, a Lisp (that language driving you crazy with brakets) dialect for the JVM. It was very interesting to learn how he used the DLTK in combination with his own ANTLR parser. There seem to be a lot of issues addressed by Xtext and DLTK. I wonder if it would make sense to integrate these two tools. Stephan Herrmann then presented a new episode of the famous Object Teams series. After a short "previously on OT" flash back (summarizing OT as a great tool for reusing existing components in a flexible (via AOP techniques) yet controlled (via modules and a role-team-concept) manner), the story continued with a special and important problem: persistence. He explained how it is possible to use OT in combination with O/R-mappers -- with minimal effort by using OT techniques. Actually, this topic was subject of a diploma thesis (in german language) by Olaf Otto. OT is a proposed Eclipse project, and I hope it will become a real Eclipse project, soon. Igor Novakovic demonstrated a powerful tool called SMILA. It is an Eclipse project for setting up tool chains for querying, processing and extracting data. In his demo, he showed how to combine some cool Fraunhofer tools for image recognition with a search engine (Lucene) (probably other tools were involved as well). The nice thing about SMILA is that in the end all these tools are combined in a way that some data can be queried in a very simple manner (e.g. HTML formular). In the demo, some chemical structures could be searched in a collection of research papers. Simply querying the text content wouldn't be that thrilling, but in that case, a tool analyzed the figures in the papers and presented the molecules using Jmol. Some years ago I integrated a search engine (Verity Information Server) with a CMS based on StoryServer, and a tool like SMILA would have been a great help (I assume that with SMILA I would have spent days instead of months to accomplish that task...). Finally, Enrico Schnepel presented a small framework called emf.observables for simplifying EMF databinding. His cool (Prezi based) slides are available, too. Actually it is a small yet helpful tool, generating some plugins next to your EMF model implementation with some wrapper classes hiding the complexity of EMFObservables/IObservable. It was a really interesting and inspiring evening: A big thank you to all the presenters. See you all again at the next Berlin Eclipse DemoCamp (or Day ;-)).