Simon Zambrovski

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.

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.

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.