Nordic Coding Spring 2011

April 20, 2011 Simon No comments

Last friday I was visiting the Nordic Coding event in Kiel, in Northern Germany. The event was a nice unwinder with three promiment speakers: Martin Lippert, Jan Köhnlein and Ralf Ebert. Moderated by Sven Efftinge from itemis the event was a full success with neary 50 visitors. After three talks, we relaxed by some finger food and a cold beer sposnoserd by DiWiSH and itemis.

Martin told about the OSGi technology and the usage of it in big projects. He advertised the OSGi module system but also pointed on some pitfalls during design of the architecture. I was a little dissapointed, since it was a kind of entry-level talk, and its main emphasis was to recollect the importance of the service-oriented principle during system design. He pointed out the importance of loosly coupling and implicit dependency which foster maintainability of the system for many years. In the same time the fulfillment ofsuch architectural principles does not come for free.

Jan Köhnlein made a talk on DSLs in general and Xtext 2.0 in particular. The guys from itemis did a nice job in developing Xbase, a new language which can be used inside of the user DSL. For me, it is a huge step towards ubiquitous application of DSLs in software projects. Xbase give the ability to specify behaviour inside of DSLs. It is statically typed, compiles to Java, supports closures and type inference, operator overloading, etc.. – many nice features to use a little more functional programming language features in your DSL. Especially the ability to mix Java Types with Types defined in your DSL in combination with higher-order functions seems very powerfull to me.

Finally, Ralf Ebert made a very decent presentation on Git – the popular distributed versioning system. I am a big fan of Git and use it for many things i develop and saw many different presentation on those – but Ralf’s was the best one. He explained very plastically the difference in usage of Git to other versioning systems like SVN or CVS. He also showed a nice demo by showing some interesting branching and merging scenarios by switching between two users (Alice and Bob) on his machine and developing a simple web application. It was fast, precise and understandable – very nice talk.