Simon Zambrovski

The vacation time of most people is over, so it is time to meet and discuss a little. A good opportunity to do this will be given on September 1st in Roxie, Hamburg during the Eclipse Stammtisch. The event name translates into regular’s table and indicates a regularity of the happening. Even if the upcoming event is only the second in series I expect to meet many people after the great feedback after the last one.

Details:

• When: Monday, September 1st, 19:00 CET
• Where: Roxie, Hamburg, Germany
• Directions: http://www.roxie-hamburg.com/roxieway.htm 
• Who’s comming: Doodle Poll

See you next Monday.

The first “Eclipse Stammtisch Hamburg” took place in Bolero in Ottensen. It was a full success, about 50 people were there. Peter and Stefan seemed to like it too. I was glad to see people I met on Eclipse Democamp again. I liked the location, having a separated room, big enough for another 50 people. I spoke with Ralph on the intended frequency of the event - it could be good to have it once in a quater. Some pictures can be seen in my FlickR gallery.

As most Java developers using Eclipse IDE, I prefer to use it for everything. All right, I’m not using Eclipse to control my media player, but I’m using it for publishing.

Since my project work, I’m a TeX user and not a MS Word user. Even if I’m pretty good in using old MS Office, I’m completely lost with MS Office 2007. Beside of this fact, I like the way how you create documents using LaTex because it is similar to coding - you write you source code and compile the output.

Publishing in LaTeX under Windows is possible using MikTeX. In addition you need an editor. Under Linux, one would use vi or emacs. For Windows several alternatives are possible: WinEDT that is good, but a commercial product or TexnicCenter which is a good freeware editor. The problem with both of them is: they only support editing and not other activities around the publishing. Especially, activity that is of utmost importance for me is versioning of the artifacts. Version control systems are excellent integrated in Eclipse, and with help of Texlipse you get the entire environment needed for LaTeX publishing.

One feature, I missed all the time using Texlipse was spell checking. It was supported by Texlipse since 2005, but I got it not configured. Today, after my professor told me once again to use a spellchecker, I promised to set up the Aspell inside of Texlipse. With some help from Gedankenstrom and reading the aspell help I got it. Here is a short description (I assume that Texlipse is successfully installed).

1. Download Aspell.
2. Install Aspell (to any! directory) and dictionaries.
3. Open Preferences->Texlipse->Spell Checker
4. Enter the Aspell command (a complete path to aspell.exe)
5. Correct Aspell arguments to -a -t –lang=%language
6. Open Preferences->Texlipse->Spell Checker->Environment
7. Create a new environment variable with key: prefix and value:
   path-to-your-aspell-directory, using / insted of \.
8. Press Ctrl + Shift + 6 for spell checking

Technorati tags: eclipse, texlipse, publishing, aspell, latex

During the ongoing work on development of a language for enterprise modeling it seems reasonable to develop a prototype modeling tool. Especially in case of enterprise models, which tend to become huge very quickly, it is important to have a possibility to define views on the models, and store them persistently. Eclipse ecosystem offers a bunch of frameworks for creation of DSLs, but these only support certain types of mapping between model elements and notations.

Helge concentrated during the work on his Master Thesis on development of that prototype tooling.

Our talk concentrated on building a repository for GMF-based diagram editor models. Due to the limitation in resources, the goal was to minimize the adoptions and changes of GMF/EMF generators and create a prototype model repository.

Thanks to Marco Kuznik from Loroma for providing the video of the talk. It is pretty dark, but you can hear our voices and it is in German.

Yesterday, the first Hamburger Eclipse DemoCamp took place. About fifty participants and eight speakers met in the nice Spanish restaurant Aqui in Schanzen-District, just a step away from the Headquaters of Gentleware AG. The event was, what it should be - a local exchange of experience and know-how in the area of Eclipse. Because of the interests of Gentleware, b+m Informatik AG and itemis AG, the session was not just Eclipse-generic, but focused on MDSD topics. I liked the fact that the participants quickly build a homogenous group - all of them had some experience in PDE, EMF, etc. Amazing demo has been shown by Frank Zimmerman, who used some MDSD techniques to program the Lego Robot. A very nice start event, hopefully it can become a tradition. The photos are available in a FlickR’s Photo Set.

MDSD Session

I listened to a session on SOA platform and later got to a workshop on EMF and large models. I got there just by an accident, resulting from the discussion with guyes from Gentleware and SAP. We spoke in a lunch discussion about the problems of EMF. Then Axel Uhl just invited me to participate and I got probably to the most interesing part of the summit. It was very informative and I spent several hours with the MDSD gurus like Ed Merks, Marcus Voelter, Bernd Kolb, three gyes from SAP, formely Interactive Objects, three gyes from Gentleware and a couple of persons I don’t know. The subject of the workshop was the discussion of large models, and problems and issues on the management and infrastructure. After the long dialog on needs and nice-to-haves the group agreed on a need of creation of an open-source EMF-based repository, in order to identfy the opporunities of what is available today and pain-points of existing solutions. The open source nature should foster the consolidation of a spread knowlegde and experience on EMF in a single project. Later, I visited an excited demo of Ed Merks on new features of EMF.

Thanks to Ed, we all got a wonderful picture of all us…
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BIRT Session
Other intersting sessions visited were the BIRT-related session. It seems that this Eclipse project gets adult. I was really impressed on the variety of features and especially the number of solutions to real world problems I often tried to solve during my industrial activities. It seems that BIRT can be seen as a next level open source reporting tool, that offers a good foundation for further in-enterprise reporting.