EclipseCon Europe Day 1

Yesterday started the 2011 edition of EclipseCon Europe. It was a great opportunity to attend very nice talks. Unfortunately everybody cannot be there so here is a small description of the talks that I’ve seen along with links for those who want to know more.

As an Eclipse modeling guy, I’ve started the day with the EMF tutorial in which newcomers to the EMF world could learn what EMF is and taste several key EMF based technologies available in the eclipse foundation thanks to well detailed explanations from the Eclipse Source guys and speakers from the modeling community. For those who want to try this tutorial, its content is available online here and there along with the slide of the presentation.

After a good launch and an interesting keynote from David Cuartielles, I went to the virtual EMF talk. During this talk, Hugo and Gregoire have presented a new technology to manipulate several EMF models with different metamodels as one model seamlessly. After a good explanation of the concept behind virtual EMF, we had the opportunity to watch it during a demonstration using MoDisco. You can already try virtual EMF and send them your feedback by grabbing it on Eclipse labs.

Just after this talk I had to present my talk on Acceleo. Where I’ve presented how Acceleo can be used to create and maintain easily a code generator for the language of your choice. I’ll put my presentation online as soon as possible for those who missed it even if the Eclipse Foundation seems to use a very good system to register the talks and I hope that we will be able to see that way the talk we missed later.

Then I went to Jan’s talk on graphical editing in which he presented an interesting DSL based approach to create a diagram editor. He showed how starting with an EMF model, in his case in an Xtext DSL, you could use a DSL to create the mapping between your model elements and the elements displayed in your diagram and how, in a style sheet DSL, you could define the design of your diagram. With few lines of code, you end up easily with a working diagram view. For those who want to give it a try, go to Jan’s blog and github account.

This first day was concluded by a keynote from John Swainson giving us the story of the birth of Eclipse and of course a great party to celebrate the 10th birthday of Eclipse.