Last Thursday we had our edition of the Eclipse Democamp in Copenhagen. With 70+ participants it can only be considered a big success - given the COP15 conference going on right now in Copenhagen, it is not always easy to get around in Copenhagen these days.
We were very lucky that IBM had both room and food to spare for the event - thanks for that.
You can find the slides from the demo camp on eclipse.dk as I get them from the presenters.
I started the camp with a presentation of the ideas behind e4 with focus on the differences you will see as a developer in the future. We will be talking about this a lot more in the future.
Jesper Steen Møller talked about the state-of-the-art of the XPath2, XML Catalog and XSLT tooling in the WTP project. Among other things, Jesper showed a very cool debug session of XSLT.
Bent Agervold Jensen - from ReportSoft - showed some very pretty graphics based on BIRT. I was rather impressed. I will have to look at BIRT again in some near future. Bent showed two real-life examples from the web based om some work they had done for customers - quite impressive.
Mikkel Heisterberg - from Intravision - showed how Lotus Notes in an extension of Eclipse and illustrated how your "plain" Eclipse plug-ins can be used in Lotus Notes with a little extra work. He rightly stated that many of the things we will see in e4, already is present in Lotus Expeditor, but with e4 we will hopefully get something everybody will use...
Jakob Lyng Petersen - from Maconomy - showed some of the work they have done with a commercial application based on Eclipse RCP. Among the more interesting things - for me at least - was their good looking presentation API and the way they have implemented searching just about everywhere. I bet that some of the new e4 technologies would have helped them a loot in their implementation...
Ekkart Kindler - from DTU - showed how the modeling framework in Eclipse can be used together with Petri nets.
Steen Brahe - from Danske Bank - talked about how he has used GMF in his bank. He first outlined the different models that makes up the GMF framework and then showed how they had enhanced their UML editor via a new model that described some of the constraints they have in the domain models. Not that I understood it all, but it was quite obvious that they can save a lot of work in their UML modeling this way.
Jan Schoubo - from Oracle - talked about the LEJLN platform - Linux-Eclipse-Java-LEGO NXT - for absolute beginners. This was by far the most fun presentation where Jan showed how you can program LEGO NXT via Eclipse with a impressive demo where he got a LEGO to to find the colors of small LEGO bricks and showed these on the attached computer.
The next eclipse.dk event will be our general assembly in January.
