Eclipse Summit Europe 2009

This year's Eclipse Summit Europe is again a very nice happening. It's so important to meet all the people you're chatting and mailing with in person.
Yesterday, Sebastian and I had the chance to demo some of the new Xtext features we've been working on in the Helios train. It was much fun and we got very positive feedback for both the talk and (more important) the features. We'll post the demos to our blogs very soon.

I'm especially excited about how well Xtext is accepted within the Eclipse Community. Yesterday there were at least three talks about other projects which make use of Xtext:

• The b3 guys are working on a DSL to describe builds
• In the new EMF Search implementation the query language is implemented with Xtext
• The Relax NG tools are as well implemented in Xtext
  

How about e4? Designing UIs works good in a WYSIWYG style, but there are scenarios where you want to program parts of it. In addition storing the UI descriptions in XMI is not necessarily the best option. You cannot read it and it's very hard to diff and merge them. I can imagine that a programmer friendly textual syntax might please the modeling skeptics a bit. We can still use a WYSIWYS editor on top.

Implementing the CSS functionality with Xtext could be another opportunity to get more for less. To find out, I'll have to attend Kai's talk about the CSS customization in e4 this morning.
There are lots of other interesting sessions to attend today. Unfortunately I have to decide between listening to

• Sebastian Benz (BMW) who talks about how Xtext is applied in the automotive industry (AUTOSAR) and
  
• Jan Koehnlein and Jos Warmer who talk about how to combine Xtext and GMF
  

because they are both scheduled for 14:40.