Our Eclipse Summit Europe

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aurelien.pupier
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Eclipse Summit Europe (ESE) took place last week. Here's some feedback on this great conference I attended with Mickaël Istria.

BonitaSoft Presentations

I presented the two highly customized GMF-based editors of Bonita Open Solution Studio during the Modeling Symposium (see my presentation below).  The goal of the presentation was to show customization that can be done with GMF while keeping agility for development. You can find the slides here. I'm pretty happy with the results, as I got good feedback and people came to ask more details on how the BonitaSoft Team does this.

By the way, we plan to submit a more complete and technical talk for EclipseCon 2011, in which we will show more about how to "pimp a GMF editor" with concrete and practical tips. Please tell us if you want us to include some specific content.

We also presented a poster. It was interesting to meet potential end users of the product, and people that are interested in the Eclipse technologies we are using (and sometimes both at the same time).

People

ESE was a great opportunity to meet a lot of people, contributors, commiters, and end-users. I thank all of them for the excellent exchange of knowledge and know-how.

There were also a few good runners who were able to wake up early in the morning. This is a good way to start a conference day.

Talks

There were lots of great talks. I'll highlight 2 of them, my favorites.

The first was "Scale, Share and Store your Models with CDO," about the new features of CDO. There was also a demo of Dawn. This allows real collaborative work with GMF editors using CDO technology. Modifications on a diagram appear in real-time on the diagram of another instance of the editor, or on another instance of a web-based GMF-editor!! It also shows potential conflicts on the diagram in real-time. In a nutshell, this talk was really amazing.

The second is "Distilling Heap Dumps: a Guide to Using and Extending Memory Analyzer." I was already aware of some basic usage of MAT, but there is so much more that I learned during the talk. For instance, you can use MAT to observe the Thread or Bundle state. MAT also provides extension points to add customized queries, customized reports, customized names for better rendering, and more.

Advanced Technologies Experimentation

There were more than a few great experts at the conference. We took advantage of that and did some "advanced" experimentation.

With the help of Kai Töedter and his blogpost, Mickael set up the CSS styling of e4 in Bonita Studio, our RCP application based on Eclipse 3.6.

Mickaël also began to improve the build of SWTBot project by using Tycho. You can follow it via the mailing list.

On my side, I pair-programmed with Mariot Chauvin in order to improve support of SVG figures in the GMF editor. I spotted a memory issue some time ago (using MAT, btw) and this was a great opportunity to look at it deeper.

We plan to write some blogposts soon about this stuff. So stay tuned :)

And in conclusion...

In short, this conference was great. We came back with a lot of contacts and new knowledge. We are also proud to have shared the expertise we have acquired while developing Bonita Studio.

One final piece of advice and personal reminder: don't leave the paper wrapping of the SwissAir chocolate in your pocket - it might earn you an advanced security check!

View more presentations from BonitaSoft.
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