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

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.

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!

They picked up for the second time a sentence of mine for a book cover. This time is Joy of Clojure. I think the language and the book are really worthy to take a look at them.

http://www.manning.com/fogus/

As an employee of an academic institution I have access to the IEEE Xplore digital library.

The scientific community produces, for free, the content, than review, for free, the content and finally IEEE makes available this content asking for a fee. I am ok with that, after all they provide a service organizing the whole publication process.

Unfortunately, subscribers who are paying quite a lot to access to the content have to do that accepting very strict terms:

 Institutional subscribers are NOT permitted to do the following:

• Allow anyone other than a Licensed User to access or use IEEE Xplore.
• Display or otherwise make any information from IEEE Xplore available to anyone other than a Licensed User.
• Transmit electronically, via e-mail or other file transfer protocols, any portion of IEEE Xplore.
• Download or attempt to download an entire issue or issues of a publication contained in IEEE Xplore.
• Create an archive of any portion of IEEE Xplore;
• Use robots or intelligent agents to access, search and/or systematically download any portion of IEEE Xplore.
• Use any portion of IEEE Xplore for document delivery, fee-for-service use, or bulk reproduction or commercial distribution of materials in any form.
• Alter or modify any portion of IEEE Xplore;
• Delete or remove in any form or format, including on a printed
• article, any copyright information or notice contained in IEEE Xplore.
• Reproduce or redistribute any portion of IEEE Xplore or
• Combine any portion of IEEE Xplore with any other material.

(from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/termsOfUse.jsp)

So you are not allowed to download all the articles from a special issue of interest or to send a paper to a colleague of you. You could neither store pdf files on your PC. You can neither perform elaboration of the content you paid for for pure scientific purpose.

Conversely the terms from Springer are a lot better.

I am not involved neither with IEEE nor Springer, but I asked for some clarification to both these organizations. Springer replied kindly and the terms of access to the content given are definitely more open. I am talking about accessing the content my University pay for (after contributing to produce it).

So, consider that when you have to choose where to pubblish.