What every Eclipse developer should know about EMF - Tutorial at EclipseCon

We are looking forward to present  the tutorial „What every Eclipse developer should know about EMF“ at EclipseCon next week, Monday 9.00 am. Let us shortly explain how we got to that idea. The starting points for this idea were:

1.  Even if modeling is a very active area in the Eclipse community, there are many developers who have no experience with EMF at all
2. Many of those developers complain that it is hard to gain an initial overview about modeling techniques and frameworks. Eclipse is always not only about knowing a specific technology but also knowing about the Ecosystem.

So the goal of the tutorial is to tackle both issues and introduce “What every Eclipse developer should know about EMF”. The title is of course inspired by the great talk about dependency injection by Sven Efftinge on Eclipse Summit`10.

For the first issue we created a basic EMF tutorial, which covers EMF modeling and gives entry points for the most important topics such as UI programming and data management. The second issue is a little bit harder to resolve. How could we give a good overview about different modeling technologies? There were two great things influencing us. The first was the Model  Symposium at Eclipse Summit, which showed us how many short talks can provide a nice overview of many technologies. The second influence was the Ignite Competition held by the Eclipse Foundation. An Ignite talk consist of 20 slides, switched automatically every 15 seconds and is therefore exactly 5 minutes. This format forces to concentrate on the most important facts instead of going into detail about specific topics. We combined these two ideas and invited Project Leads of modeling projects to introduce their projects with an Ignite talk during the second part of our tutorial. We hope this will provide a good overview of available technologies and therefore cover the second part of “What every Eclipse developer should know about EMF”.

We are looking forward to welcome you as participants of this tutorial. As a preparation for the hands-on part, we kindly ask you to have a (fresh) installation of the Eclipse Modeling Edition (Helios).