I'm sitting in my room at the Hyatt hotel in Santa Clara, California. It's 6 am and I'm glad I could sleep til 5 am at least. Seems that the 7h bike trip we did yesterday did its job (we hoped that being outside most of the day would get us in tune with the local time zone). I only wished the saddle hadn't been so hard....
Today, the conference starts and I'm currently looking at what sessions I'ld like to attend.
Monday
Monday starts with the introduction of the e4-Rover Mars Challenge. I bet you've already heard of it. Right after that Jan, Moritz and Heiko give a 3 hour tutorial called "Xtext meets e4". They will show how one can model a workbench in a textual way. They have worked hard on preparing the workshop material and I'm curious to see how the audience like what they have. After lunch the shorter presentations begin. I'm going to see what Stephan and Kenn think the twenty modeling things are and am looking forward to the b3 talk. After that Peter has his session on Xpand just before Heiko presents on how one can apply MDSD to develop IPhone apps. Also I want to note Jan's talk on combining GMF and Xtext.
In the evening I have a modeling panel and after that there's the community awards ceremony. Xtext is finalist in the category "most innovative project". How cool is that? :-)
Tuesday
In the morning I'll be out on another bicycle trip. After that I'll have to practice my presentations for the afternoon (yes I practice and I always hope nobody watches me while I'm doing so :-)).
After lunch there are a couple of talks I find interesting. Kai presents on CSS in e4 and Berni does his penalty shoot out of textual modeling tools (didn't know there are other than Xtext ;-)).
I'm also interested in what's new in CDT. Not because I'm a big fan of C/C++, but I'm interested in Eclipse-based IDE development. At 2 pm it's showtime for Sebastian and me. We'll demo the coolest IDE features you get when developing a language in Xtext. And right after that there's the Modeling Runway, where a couple of modeling projects present their projects (5 min each).
Later that day I'll likely attend the Graphiti talk. Let's see if it is any better than GMF. I think I'll have a break after that in order to read through Wayne's revised Eclipse Development Process in order to be prepared for the Development at Eclipse panel I am attending.
Wednesday
I am not yet decided whether to go to "Modular Architecture from Top to Bottom" or "API Design and Evolution" in the morning. Both seem very interesting, but I guess I'll have more fun asking controversial questions in the API talk :-). In the afternoon I probably will visit the Groovy IDE talk. The new version of the Eclipse plugin looks great. Especially the tight integration with JDT is pretty cool. But I also might go out for another trip, since the weather is forecast to be great. If not I'll go to see what cool features Eike and his team brought to CDO lately. In the evening Sebastian will present the new version of MWE2. It's implemented in Xtext and we're very proud of the result and how easy it was to implement it using Xtext.
Thursday
For me the day certainly starts with "Understanding and Using Git at Eclipse". Actually we're still using CVS and I personally am ok with it because of the great tooling Eclipse provides. The only problem we have is its slowness. Synchronizing my development workspace sometimes takes 15 min. So we plan to switch to Git right after Helios.
In the afternoon the talk about Dependency Injection got my attention. I love DI, though I am also a bit concerned about how DI is used in e4. I'll make sure to have some discussions with the e4 folks about my concerns. I'll have to bring my bicycle back to the store in the early evening, so I won't be able to attend any other talks on Thursday.
These are just my personal selection of a great variety of interesting talks you can attend at this year's EclipseCon. All in all it looks like a very diverse program and I'm looking forward to four interesting days full of great talks and discussions. I especially like the trend towards shorter presentations because I expect them to be better prepared and more focused.
....ups, it's already 8:17 am (I've had a great breakfast in the meantime) and I am missing the e4-Rover Mars Challenge. I'll have to go now. See you!
