tl;dr: Altran organizes the first Eclipse DemoCamp in Eindhoven to celebrate the Photon Release Train on July 4, 17:00 hrs. Register today! We have Mélanie Bats of Obeo talking about Sirus 6, our own Marc Hamilton summarizing lessons learned from 10 years worth of MDE projects, and itemis’ Karsten Thoms and Holger Schill reporting about the latest features of Eclipse Platform 4.8 and Xtext 2.14, respectively.

After hosting the Sirius Day in April, we’re already looking at the next Eclipse event at Altran Netherlands: We’ll host the first Eclipse DemoCamp in Eindhoven to celebrate the Photon Release Train on July 4, 17:00 hrs.

We’ll start off at 17:00 hrs with a small dinner, so we all can enjoy the talks without starving. Afterwards, we have a very exiting list of speakers:

  • Mélanie Bats, CTO of Obeo, will tell us about What’s new in Sirius 6.

    Major Changes in Sirius 6:

    • Sirius now supports an optional integration with ELK for improved diagram layouts: specifiers can configure which ELK algorithm and parameters should be used for each of their diagrams, directly inside the VSM (ticket #509070). This is still considered experimental in 6.0.

    • A new generic edge creation tool is now available on all Sirius diagrams. With it, end users no longer have to select a specific edge creation tool in the palette, but only to choose the source and target elements (ticket #528002).

    • Improved compatibility with Xtext with an important bug fix (ticket #513407). This is a first step towards a better integration with Xtext, more fixes and improvements will come during the year.

    • It is now possible for specifiers to configure the background color of each diagram. Like everything else in Sirius, the color can be dynamic and reflect the current state of the model. (ticket #525533).

    • When developing a new modeler, it is now possible to reload the modeler’s definition (.odesign) from an Eclipse runtime if the definition has changed in the host that launched the runtime. This is similar to “hot code replace” in Java, but for VSMs, and avoids stopping/restarting a new runtime on each VSM change (ticket #522407).

    • In the VSM editor, when editing an interpreted expression which uses custom Java services, it is now possible to navigate directly to a service’s source code using F3 (ticket #471900).

    A more visual overview can be found in the Obeo blog.

  • Altran’s own Marc Hamilton shares Altran’s experience developing MDE applications with Eclipse technology.

    Altran Netherlands develops Eclipse-based model-driven applications for its customers for several years.
    In this talk, we share our experience with different modeling technologies like Acceleo, OCL, QVTo, EGF, Sirius, Xtext, and others.

  • What’s new in Xtext 2.14 will be presented by Xtext committer of itemis, Holger Schill.

    Major Changes in Xtext 2.14:

    • Java 9 and 10 Support
    • JUnit 5 Support
    • New Grammar Annotations
    • Create Action Quickfix
    • Code Mining Support
    • New Project and File Wizard
    • Improved Language Server Support
    • Performance Improvements

    Please check the Release Notes for details.

  • Yet another overview by Karsten Thoms, of itemis with his talk Approaching Light Speed – News from the Eclipse Photon Platform.

    The Eclipse Photon simultaneous release comes this year with a plethora of new features and improvements that will continue the Eclipse IDE keeping the #1 flexible, scalable and most performing IDE!

    This session will give a guided tour through the new features and changes in Eclipse Photon. Due to the vast amount of noteworthy stuff the focus of this talk is on the Eclipse Platform Project, covering JDT only roughly. You will see usability improvements, useful new API for platform developers and neat features for users. Besides visible changes, the platform project team has paid special attention on stability, performance and resource consumption tuning. In this talk, I will give some insights how the team has worked on that.

    Come and see the incredible achievements the platform team and its growing number of contributors made to bring you the best Eclipse IDE ever!

More talks are in discussion. Please propose your talk to us; we’d be especially happy to include more local speakers in the lineup.

We’ll have a break and some get-together afterwards, so there is plenty of opportunity to get in touch with the speakers and your fellow Eclipse enthusiasts in the region.

The DemoCamp will take place at the Altran office in Eindhoven. Please refer to the Eclipse wiki for all details and register now to secure your spot at the first Eclipse DemoCamp in Eindhoven!