Eclipse Indigo Democamp at Microsoft!

World peace may be next! Today the Eclipse Indigo Democamp in the Netherlands, was held at the Schiphol/Amsterdam office of Microsoft Nederland. This unexpected mix of topic and venue raised many eyebrows (and tweets) in the Dutch developer communities on both sides. It turned out to be a very a very informative and enjoyable evening, with seven presentations in all.

Wim Hoek of Microsoft Nederland welcomes all visitors to this democamp and refers to various tweets about the meeting of these two camps. The reason is simple: Microsoft is about developers, developers, developers. And that includes developers using Eclipse.

Yuri Kok of Industrial TSI welcomes and explains the program.

Wim Jongman, eclipse committer on ECF and with Industrial TSI, introduces Orion with some quiz questions, but he does not get to give away many prizes.

Next he talksed about how to run OSGi with plugins et all inside an web or application server, allowing Eclipse developers to leverage their RCP/plugin skills on the server.

About 30 people attended, I suspect mostly from the Dutch Eclipse world.

Jos Warmer presented a case about using modelling in the insurance industry with an RCP client with a graphical policy design editor, based on Graphiti and created with Spray, a DSL to generate Graphiti shapes. Note that Spray will become OSS at sometime in the future! Currently the link leads to an empty project.

Next was a break with very nice hospitality in the very impressive Microsoft building, thank you Microsoft!

Roald Hopman explained the use of Talend Open Studio for data clean up and migration

It's obvious that Dutch meeting rooms are best suited to native Dutchmen, the tallest people in the world after the Masai. But that didn't prevent Martin Woodward to give a very fast and extensive presentation on Microsoft Team Foundation Server and demonstrating the Team Foundation Eclipse (TFE) plugin. TFE is truly a first class citizen on Team Foundation Server, running fast and well integrated on an Eclipse instance running on a MacBook pro.

This may be a very good solution for developer shops running windows and other platforms (Mac/Linux/Mobile) and integrates access from Visual Studio and Eclipse into one ALM solution. I like the concept of gated commits: requiring successful CI tests before actual committing.

Other found it interesting as well as many people wanted more info afterwards instead of going out for the break.

Teun Hakvoort talked about his experiences using the Windows Azure cloud platform for running a Java Enterprise container. Possible but not ready for prime time.

Finally Manuel Polling of Edmond Document Solutions talked about the use of an RCP based workbench for professional document workflow solutions and their switch to and experience developing a graphical workflow editor.

The evening concluded with lively discussions over drinks.

Thank you to Microsoft and Industrial TSI!

Eclipse Demo Camp Antwerp approaching!

30 November Eclipse experts and enthusiasts from Belgium and The Netherlands will gather in Kontich near Antwerp to attend Eclipse Demo Camp November 2010/Antwerp.
In prior years it was more of a Netherlands only event, but now it is a combined effort of Industrial TSI and SmartApp.

The presenters currently scheduled are:

• Ralph Mueller, Eclipse Foundation: "You know the past, can you guess the future of Eclipse?"
• Ralf Sternberg, EclipseSource: A talk from the Eclipse Summit 2010: "A look ahead at RAP: what's new now and will be noteworthy in the future"
• Oliver Wolf, Product Manager and Architect at SOPERA GmbH: "SOA at Eclipse"
• Wim Jongman, Industrial-TSI: Eclipse Mashup: How we use Eclipse Technology to stay ahead.

Previous events were well attended, for a brief photo impression see here for 2010 and 2009.


The number of already registered attendees is currently 17. So when you live or work in the Netherlands or Belgium and you have involvement with Eclipse in general, or Rich Web applications or Service Oriented Architecture in particular, please come and join us next week Tuesday. More information is available here and you can register here.

Eclipse Demo Camp Nieuwegein

On June 23 there was an Eclipse Democamp at Industrial TSI in Nieuwegein to celebrate the launch of Helios.As usual Yuri Kok, owner of the Dutch Eclipse User Group on LinkedIn managed to organize all the necessary ingredients like advanced networking facilities, an expectant audience of about 40 people and a number of speakers.

KEYNOTE: Wim Jongman, Helios & OSGi Remote Services

Wim Jongman introduced the new Helios release, which includes 39 projects! After that he quickly went to a demonstration of Eclipse Remote Services, and the Zookeeper discovery mechanism implementation that Remain BV (co-host of the event) has contributed to the ECF. This was a very nice demonstration that included a new widget: the "osgiloscope".

Olivier Wolf, "SOA at Eclipse -- the Eclipse SOA Initiative"

Oliver Wolf of SOPERA next introduced us the SOA Intiative at Eclipse,describing the role of community and industry working group, the split between modelling and runtime, what projects are part of the SOA Initiative and more. Revelaing was his slide that showed what areas still need to be filled in.

Drinks and slices

Always an important part of an evening gathering, this was organised splendidly: a choice of pizzas and drinks!

Ief Cuynen and Tom Bauwens, SmartApps - Single-sourcing demo Eclipse RCP / RAP

RAP and RCP are both part of the Helios release and have reached maturity. Tom showed a real life application where the shared code base and the very rich display on both the web and RCP were amply demonstrated. He also offered tips on organising your code using plugins for the shared stuff and fragments for the RCP or RAP specific stuff.

Jelle Herold, Stream BV - Statebox & Typewriter

After telling us about statebox, a process modelling and runtime engine, last time, this time Jelle described the typewriter library.Because statebox needs to work with data and types from all sorts of systems, many of them non-java, using java.lang.reflect was not an option.
Jelle's solution is an interface only reflection API, with implementations for Java (obviously), Swing, Wicket, Drupal, Solr and JFace.
He invited us to look at and use his code http://bitbucket.org/wires/typewriter.He can be contacted at jelle AT defekt DOT nl

Olivier Wolf, "Eclipse Swordfish -- Service-oriented software development made easy"

Oliver had brought a second presentation about Swordfish, a SOA engine part of the Eclipse SOA Initiative. To show us some examples he demonstrated their use of the new Discovery UI API part of Helios, that is also used by Eclipse Marketplace and Mylyn Connector discovery. We see the already(!) familiar Discovery UI, followed by the Installation part. Then he had the audience stunned by the popup of a compulsory registration dialog! See below:He then went on to explain that this was all rather simple, just using p2 requirements to download the registration code from the server and p2 touch points to invoke this code before proceeding!He promised to explain all in a blog post soon!

Doru Gardan, ST-Ericsson - "Hardware debugging on a Digital Signal Processor"

To remind us that not everyone is on the latest and shiniest new release of Eclipse. He demonstrated their customised C-compiler and debugger stuff running in Ganymede. He compiled a demo program and ran it on the hardware with chip attached to his laptop.

Conclusion

Eclipse is doing well in the Netherlands, but we still need to go a long way for all users to interact and be aware of the community aspects. So all in all an informative evening that was very well hosted by Industrial TSI. Thank you, Yuri and all your colleagues!

Dutch Eclipse Democamp 2009 at TSI International Nieuwegein

Yesterday TSI International hosted the Eclipse Democamp for about 40 people in Nieuwegein.

Photographic impression

Wim Jongman preparing for the kick off on Eclipse 4.0
Advanced networking facilities
All the chairs in the building set up
Making clear who paid for food and drink
and quite crowd came to listen and watch
Jeroen van Grondelle and Marcel Offermans about OSGI service patterns. (Only implemented in full in Apache Felix), Jeroen stressed that we have to rethink our application for OSGi to fully take advantage of its facilities and not continue in our old Eclipse habits. Think service, not listener.




Jim van Dijk on Presentation Modelling Framework. We have to learn to think about UI in a whole different way again, not in terms of implementation (widgets, controls, HTML, ...) but in their abstractions: conversations, dialogs, compound dialogs, etc.

Break for food and drink, THANK YOU Wim Jongman!
That went down just as well as the presentations
Roel Spilker and Reinier Zwitserloot talked about Project Lombok and showed the Lombox Eclipse plugin to the world for the first time!
Wim Jongman and Marcel Offermans talked about and demonstrated OSGi in the cloud using Eclipse and Apache ACE.
Finally we heard and saw Jelle Herold about Verostko graphics toolkit & Statebox process engine.

Conclusion

A well hosted gathering with excellent presentations for a growing number of Eclipse enthusiasts.

Eclipse Demo Camp Nieuwegein

Yesterday Industrial TSI hosted the Galileo Demo Camp.
The gathering was visited by people invited through the Dutch Eclipse User Group



Organization was handled perfectly by Yuri Kok and Wim Jongman.



We had Wim Jongman talking about new and Noteworthy in Galileo.



Alexander Broekhuis of luminis talked about MDA Tooling in Eclipse/RSA as used by Thales.



Jos Warmer of Ordina talked about Mod4j, a tool for making horizontal DSL's.



Arnout Engelfriet talked about Open Source licenses and the consequences of their use.



Marcel Offermand & Dennis Geurts of luminis talked about OSGI and Equinox.



The evening concluded with Koos de Goede of @portunity talked about Bleuprint, their tooling to make domain specific MDA tools. Unfortunately their Community Edition only works on Windows: no LInux, no Mac OSX.


Thank you for a very informative evening and the food and drinks!