I had the opportunity to attend the Eclipse Democamp Grenoble at the Xerox Research Centre Europe, 2012 edition. (Official page here)
That was my first participation in this Eclipse enthusiasts’ event. And I enjoyed it! The event took place over a half-day and was split into many diverse small talks. Aurélien Pupier (BonitaSoftie extraordinaire) presented there and this was an occasion to discover a lots of new stuff about the latest Eclipse release: Juno.
As you may know Juno will be available on two streams: 3.8 and 4.2. 3.8 is the continuation of the previous release, and 4.2 is a new major version (and new main stream) with plenty of cool new features:
- New workbench APIs with services approach (API break with 3.x)
- New CSS based UI customization – here is an example of what you can do
- RCP Application editor with a new application definition language/structure (e4xmi)
- New Dependency Injection mechanism (more information here)
Here is a look at the new application editor (with an application model based on EMF of course 
):
In addition to standard talks, there were the so-called “quickies” (5 minutes talks), a very interesting format to give quick tips and recommendations to Eclipse users. As I mentioned, there were a variety of talks and some people came to present their particular issues and solutions.
An especially interesting one (to me) was about model-to-model transformation, especially how to transform an EMF model into a CMIS model using M2M tools such as ATL. Another one showed us a nice use case of hybrid modeling mixing GMF and Xtext.
It was also a good way to meet the movers and shakers of the Eclipse community in my area. Here are some photos of the moving and shaking. And talking.
Hope to be there next year and meet new faces!
