DSL Workshop, FEI, Xtext 2.0 and GMF documentation

It has been more than one month ago since my last blog post so it’s time for a small update.

Last month was actually quite busy, but also very exciting. Mid June, we gave a workshop DSL development with Eclipse MDT, for which I prepared a DSL along with model transformations and a code generator to efficiently develop Android applications. Concluding from the evaluations filled in by the 23 participants, the workshop was a great success. Therefore, we are currently investigating the possibility to give this workshop a second time (contact me if you are interested).

Soon after the workshop, I attended an Android seminar organized by Nspyre and started working as a contractor at the FEI company. This company is the world leader in the production and distribution of electron microscopes. Using these microscopes, matter smaller than a nano-meter can be made visible, sometimes even be modified. Really cool stuff and a very exciting and challenging environment to work in. Obviously, the changing environment, new product and new software technologies forced me to learn already a lot of new things. Being part of a team for more than a month gave me a good impression of the software department and my role within it. I am confident I will find my place in it and will manage to add value to it. It is also worth to mention that FEI organized an internal Scrum/Agile course which I was allowed to attend. The course was taught by the people of QWAN and was very educating (and fun!).

At the model driven development front it has been a bit more quiet since these activities are now only taking place in my free time. Besides contributing to internally promoting MDD within Nspyre (of which I decided not to elaborate on this blog too much), I have attended a webinar showing new features of Xtext 2.0, which was released with Eclipse Indigo. Besides the cool new features of Xtext 2.0, the successor to Xpand (Xtend2) was presented. Xtend2′s capabilities are quite impressive, but I still don’t understand the design choice that led to develop a custom Java-like query language instead of using the OCL. The gents at itemis are aware of this, as the webinar was finalized directly after I’ve started a discussion on this topic. Really funny! Furthermore, I’ve responded to a blog post about improving the documentation of GMF. It was suggested that “GMF is not that complicated to undersand and use”, which I dare to contradict. The existence of DSL toolkits building on top of GMF (e.g. Obeo Designer) can be considered proof that I am not the only one. Pinpointing how to improve the documentation to make GMF better usable and easier to understand is thus difficult. Nonetheless, I hope documentation will be improved and GMF will survive!

So much for the update….

Cheers!

 


 

 

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