During this time we also started making plans for an extended stay in Germany, which, as you know, is the home of Really Cool Things.™ My ThinkPad was very old and totally tired, so I finally cracked open my wallet and bought a new Dell Precision M4600; I must have a keyboard with an ultranav. My new baby is fully loaded to the hilt with every desirable feature, including 16GB of 16MHz memory, two SSD drives, an i7-2920XM Quad Core, and more. It sure was a lot of work to get it set up, but I love it.
We've been in Germany since October 7th. Berlin is our home base. And of course we brought the girlies along! Since our arrival, I've been busier than ever with visits to itemis headquarters in Lünen, the Xtext guys in Kiel, EclipseCon Europe in Ludswigburg, as well as demo camps in Bonn and Dresden. We've even had a chance to go sightseeing in Rügen.
Just this past weekend I went to a friend's concert at Berliner Dom! I captured the experience with my brand new Nikon Coolpix S9100 with 18x wide optical zoom.
This week there's a stammtisch in Berlin on Thursday and next week Eike and I present at an itemis event in Bonn on Tuesday. Maybe we'll see you at one of those events! Later next week, Eike and I host an itemis training session in Oldenburg; yet another place I've never been. I'm pretty sure I've seen more of Germany in the past weeks than most Germans have seen in the past years.
It's quite clear now that Germany is the cool place to be for us to be, so we're making long term plans to stay here. It's kind of scary, but oh so exciting too. My German comprehension improves a little bit every day though my speaking abilities lag far behind, for lack of trying I'm told. In any case, I now have a very nice home office that includes a Dell UltraSharp U3011 monitor; I kiss it every morning because I love it so much.
Life is definitely very cool and exciting. I'll have to blog more often now that things are finally settling down. Xcore too is progressing well; stay tuned...
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8 comments:
Congrats on the move Ed.
That's just another excuse to visit Berlin!
Ed,
congratulations for moving to Germany - I'm German myself :-)
But I admit that I don't really understand why you are so excited about XCore. Yes, it's certainly cool, and yes, a textual concrete syntax for defining ECore models will certainly have its benefits. But after all, isn't it just a concrete syntax? No offense intended...
Christian
Let me add my congrats, too! I've been wondering if such a move might be in the works.
The infinite recursion in your photo seems to be stuck at just two levels.
Congrats! And it does seem like a nice setup you got there.
Keep in touch, specially when you are around here ;-)
Cheers,
Marcelo
Christian,
If Xcore was just about providing a syntax for Ecore, it would only be cool. What makes it really cool that it provides the ability to specify the behavior of operations, derived features, data type converters, and so on, such that one can fully specify a model without writing a line of Java code.
The north of Germany bundles the innovative movements in eclipse modeling technology. Looking forward to the XCore!
Ed,
thanks for pointing that out. I'm still a bit skeptical since there's probably no sense in re-inventing Java, so there will anyways be cases where XCore will not suffice, and one has to fall back to Java. However, I'm sure that you guys have discussed that in all details, and I'm also pretty sure that you guys know more about (the practical sides of) MDE than I do, so let's see what you are coming up with :-)
Enjoy Germany! I would love to meet you at some point in time. Beer's on me than, be it only because without EMF, large part of my research would never have been implemented...
Christian
Christian,
Xbase provides a full syntax that maps to the full syntax of Java so anything essential that you can express in a Java method body, you can express in Xbase and hence in an Xcore operation body. Xbase simply reuses Java's type systems, libraries, and runtime so in no way it aim to replace Java. Rather it provides an alternative reusable notation that we exploit in Xcore.
I fully expect that folks will always use Java in combination with Xcore, for example to actually implement new data types, but we do aim to eliminate the need to write Java code for the model's interfaces and implementations itself.
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