Eclipsecon Day 3: Conference Driven Drinking

Hi guys! Again, an exciting day at Boston!

Morning keynotes

Zack Holman from github made us laugh hard, a really great speaker. “You don’t have to be clever to succeed, I mean this is America!”, and once we acknowlegded that any developer was an horrible programmer, we saw how open source offered the opportunity to get feedback from pros and improve ourselves. Exploiting our hobbits and interests to provide a real-life service accessible to end-users is one of the awesome possibilities of Open Source. He also stressed out how project leaders should welcome oustide contributions and bring help to contributors, not only because this may be their first pull request and that can be scarry, but also because that makes your OSS alive. Zack insisted on the fact that writing doc allows you to invite people to participate without having to teach them ; ”Documentation means less work for you”: that’s exactly the Intent mantra :) The main point was to remember that Open Source is about having fun.

 

Mylyn 4.0 - Mik Kersten

Mylyn, according to me, is a great Open Source project because it’s always thinking ahead, about the new needs and technical improvments that can benefit the community. In that context, Mik explained that the golden promise of a perfect ALM tool usable from both ends of the application lifecycle has not been fulfilled yet. The key point that lead to the creation of a new major Mylyn version was the emergence of a new set of tools for other parts of software lifecycle (for project managers, business analysts, testers…), and the need for mylyn to interface with those tools. To achieve that goal, whole information that was splitted in ui, comments, tasks… will be regrouped in a model, accessible through restful APIs so that other tools can easily get that info. Clearly an excellent idea, that made bells ringle in my head with new ideas for Intent. I’ll probably add a few slides to my Intent talk tomorrow to show what awesome things we could do if all that information was represented as a model.

 

Documentation Driven Testing

I’m not going to bore you with my own talk, that would be a bit narcissic, but I’d just like to say it went pretty well, people were interested about the approach and we only had +1 feedbacks so far :)

Slides sources are available on github and soon on Intent website.

 

Now that I’ve Got a Model, Where’s my Application? - Eike Stepper

Eike explained us how we can create RCP, multi-user and scalable applications for our EMF models. A clear and easy to understand overview of the EMF mechanisms (ResourceSets, Resources fragmentation, edit plugins…). By the way, Eike has created an awesome eclipse plugin for live demonstrations, go download it on cdo website.

Eike had a great way of presenting CDO: the talk was about implementing our own EMF back-end and UI, so that we can follow all the principles that lead to the CDO project creation. Very technical, but as things went step by step everyone in the audience followed. Eike even draw sketches of the UI on a piece of paper (not spoiling you but great joke during that part), I really liked this talk and I think any EMF enthusiast should see it. It is definitely the kind of talk I’m here to see: easy to understand but very technical, and just fun enough so that people keep following.

 

If you want to see how we can use the CDO technology to provide live collaboration around modelers created with Sirius and kick-ass end-user experience, don’t miss Mathieu’s talk tomorrow.

 

Mylyn BoF

Ah, the Mylyn BoFs :) Always having a great time exchanging ideas (and especialy beers) with the mylyn team. This one was especially interesting as we discussed what the Mylyn 4.0 metamodel should look like. I really like the fact that these discussions are made in public, and top-level mylyn commiters were ready to hear my ideas. This is what open-source should look like, thanks again for this passionate discussion guys.

 

Community

At every eclipsecon, I end up missing talks because I’m talking to interesting people. And that’s ok: that’s what eclipsecon is about right? Last night and today were especially great in that regards. I was thrilled to discover Michael Scharf, and not only for his keen eye on software world but also for all the things he made me think about. Please people, do not hesitate to talk to me whenever you see me, even if I’m working, or already talking, I want to hear what you have to tell me :)

Now it’s nearly time to go to bed, I really want to nail the Intent talk tomorrow and see sparkles in the audience eyes.