Eclipse Summit Europe 2009: The Final Day

The day started with Tony Ballenti's keynote about the dynamics of open source.


He explored the various reasons why organizations get involved in open source and how that motivation matures over time.


As with all things in life, investing more effort generally generates more reward, or at least the potential for that. Nevertheless, many if not most are quite comfortable investing very little while still reaping significant rewards. Tony spent a lot of time talking about ecosystems with these takeaways.


From a modeling perspective, we've gained a great deal of value from innovative individuals including many researchers. In addition, a significant number of companies have grown in this space and are investing heavily in it, which is very good if you consider where we'd be if we still relied primarily on the two large organizations that kicked off this venture.

After the break, during which I talked with Bernd, Boris, and Kai about using Xtext to specify a CSS subset for e4 styling, was Kenn Hussey, Raphael Faudou, and Patrick Tessier's Papayrus talk.


The room was way overcrowded and there just wasn't enough air. They outlined the history of the project, i.e., they started as a number of separate external UML tool efforts. These efforts merged under the Papyrus 2 umbrella which is now producing some very slick looking technology. Kenn described the "perfect storm" that's bringing things together.


The project aims to separate out a DSL backbone that can be reused with other models such as SysML, BPMN2, and so on. Stay tuned for other developments in the area of a common DSL workbench...

Markus Herrmannsdoerfer's COPE talk was in the same room and it was even more crowded, so much so that people just couldn't fit in the room anymore.


I assume many people have data that needs to be migrated as their models change. Go figure. The idea behind Cope is to track the changes made to the Ecore model and then apply those same operations to the actual instance data. He demonstrated how it really works with a simple state machine model.

Hajo Eichler's Model Execution Framework talk was also in the same room.


Thank goodness someone figured out how to open a window or I'd have died by now. He did a bit of slide "borrowing" for his talk; Eike and I made it clear intend to send the license police after him. Quickly thereafter, you could hear the police sirens out in the street, and he looked worried. He showed how he extended the Ecore model to be able to express behavior using a subset of UML activities. There's an intepretter to execute the model as well as a debugger for interactively tracking the execution process. It looks very promising.

After that was lunch, during which Thomas, Henrik and I talked with Wayne about how we can help with aggregating p2 repositories for Helios and for projects not on the release train. Unfortunately, I missed all the afternoon sessions dealing with modeling project management issues. If I told you about them, I'd have to kill you. I really wanted to see EuGENia;I heard from others that it was really cool. I also wanted to see the progress that was made on EEF. It was a bit of a bummer to miss all the interesting sessions that afternoon. There should be more time for chatting at these conferences...

By late afternoon, word had gotten out that it was my birthday. During the closing session, Ralph incited the entire audience to sing happy birthday for me. How embarrassing is that? According to German custom, I should have bought cake for everyone and invited them all to a party. Sorry dudes, I can't afford that much cake. As expected, ESE just keeps getting better each year and I look forward to next year.