A few days ago I recorded a short screencast to show how it is possible to visualize a file inside Jetbrains MPS.

Packt is celebrating the publication of its 1000th title: who registers before 30th September 2012, to download any one of our eBooks for free. Packt is also opening its online library for a week for free to members, offering customers an easy to way to research their choice of free eBook.

To have more details please visit this link: http://bit.ly/S5kyQC! 

Anyone who will register until the 30th of September at Packt (www.packtpub.com) is in for a pleasant surprise gift. 

I am attending the second day of EASE 2012 were I presented some results about the maturity of modeling and MDD in Italy.

Great Gala Dinner ended with Flamengo dancers bringing attendees to the dance floor. Wine helped a lot.

Organizers have done a great job. 

Last week-end I was at the Eclipse Florence Day.

The experience was amazing for different reasons. The city is astonishingly beatiful and the level of the people presenting was incredibly high (except for me).

For example Lars Vogel was present as well as Ed Merks, Sven Efftinge, Tom Schindl and Eike Stepper. The possibility to meet those gurus was invaluable. There was also people from Italian universites (Politecnico di Milano, Università di Torino) and from interesting companies (Jaspersoft and my favourite one: Itemis).

At the end of the conference the speakers were invited for a drink in the Belvedere from which we had a nice sight of Florence.

I was there to present some results about a survey we performed to evaluate the usage of modeling techniques and Model-driven development in Italy. We chose this venue because the importance of Modeling for the Eclipse Community is high and increasing and because the Eclipse Modeling is the platform of choice for many MDD practicioners thanks to the plethora of technologies built around EMF (Xtext, GMF, CDO and many others). Slides are available at Slideshare:
Eclipse Florence Day: Modeling in the Italian Industry

Some weeks ago I gave this presentation about the Meta Programming System at the Java User Group of Torino.

Slides are available at Slideshare.

A recording of the presentation is available on Presentz.

http://presentz.org/jugtorino/201204_01_metaprogramming 

The Jetbrains MetaProgrammin-System (MPS)

The MetaProgramming-System is a Language Workbench based on projectional editing and it is the most advanced publicly available tool of this kind.

If you have not yet took a look at it you should, really. It makes possible (and easy!) to evolve and mix programming languages and modelling languages providing specific tool support.

Have you ever dreamed to improve a little bit your favourite language (e.g., Java). Well, with MPS it is just some clicks away. To get familiar with it take a look at the basic tutorials at http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/documentation/index.html.

In this tutorial we will see how to add an action to the IDE.

How to write an action for MPS

The tutorial was tested using MPS 2.0.6

We want to add an action that we can invoke from the “Tools” menu.

The first step is create a new Project (File -> New Project).

Then we should add the plugin aspect to the language.

Now we have to create a Group.

This group will contain our Action. Set its name (ExportGroup) and add an element list where the editor indicates an error. Under the modifications section specify that the editor should go under the Tools group.

Then we should add an action.

Set the name and the caption. To test that our action get invoked we will show a Message using JOptionPane. To do that we should add the stub to our language. Select our language and from the context menu select “Module properties”. In the common tab add under Accessory models the javax.swing stub.

We can now add the code to show a message.

Add the Action to the group.

Now build the language (from the context menu of the Language select “Make Language ‘name of your language’ “). In the Tools menu it is now present our action.

If we invoke it a message appears.

In the next tutorial we will add some code into the action to export the models as XML.

I was contacted by Intel because they launched their app-market for PC e netbooks names “Intel AppUp” and they are looking for programmers developing applications for their market.

I never heard before about Intel AppUp but the person who contacted me convinced me to take a look and register for an SDK.

Let’s see how it evolves.

In the meantime it is time to update the resumè adding a new experience (tutoring on EMF) and citing that I enrolled for a PhD.

The new version of the Eclipse Plugin for Scala has taken a big leap forward in robustness, reliability and responsiveness.

(http://www.scala-ide.org/2011/03/the-next-development-phase-for-the-scala-ide-for-eclipse/)

I tried it on different O.S., different machines. It is still CRAP. It is absolutely unusable to me.

When I have a project with 5+ jars auto-completion start crashing and freezing the system, error messages are sometimes really misleading. It is absolutely terrible. I still do not understand how it is possible to use to actually do some work. Out there there are a lot of reviews absolutely terrible from people who had experiences like mine. But there is also someone stating to use it. How? I tried many times but… it seems just unusable crap to me. I would be glad to be proved wrong, of course!