EclipseCon Europe Day 3

On the latest day of EclipseCon Europe 2011, several presentations marked the day. Starting with the first european presentation of Mylyn Intent. Intent is a documentation tool letting you keep your documentation synchronized with your code and define validation rules to ensure that your work follows the development guidelines of your project. If you ever had a synchronization problem between your documentation and your code, you should give it a try.

I started the afternoon attending to Simon’s talk about Orion, the web based platform of the Eclipse Foundation. After a presentation of the state of the Orion project during which we saw its amazingly fast editor and how the Orion team fused concepts of IDEs and web based applications, we had a demonstration of how the self hosted mode can help debug problems and distribute fixes very quickly. I am looking forward for an Orion based debugger and it’s definitively a project on which we should keep an eye on. 

Later, Sebastian’s talk presented Xtend, a programming language aimed at the development of Java application by cutting the noise in the Java language and by improving it with new features like closures. As the Xtend language compiles to Java, Xtend is to Java what CoffeeScript is to Javascript. Have a look at their awesome website for more information.

After that, Martin Flügge realized a talk about Dawn, a framework used to create collaborative tools based on CDO. With a live demonstration of a collaborative diagram editor based on Dawn, Martin has presented how Dawn can help modeling tools to move easily a step further with real-time shared editing, conflict handling and locking. You can find Martin’s slides about dawn on the CDO website.

And finally, Mikael showed us the latest features of EMF Compare. With the introduction of graphical comparison of diagrams, protection of the consistencies of models depending from one another (such as during a commit) and a new comparison engine dedicated to UML models, EMF Compare strengthen its place as a must have tool in the development environment of any Eclipse modeling developer.

This edition of EclipseCon Europe was concluded by a closing session during which everyone had the opportunity to thank the people who worked hard organizing this EclipseCon for their great work!