I’m finally back home from my Eclipse Luna Democamp Mini-Tour this year and it was awesome. I met many new and old friends and learned a lot. While I am not interested that much in topics like modelling, SWT and RCP for day-to-day business (remember, we do M2M/IoT software like the MQTT Server HiveMQ), I enjoyed learning about new things in these spaces and I was impressed again about the diversity of the Eclipse Ecosystem.

Democamp Munich

My first stop was the Eclipse Democamp in Munich. The location, catering and organization was fantastic and the room was packed. There was a great variety of topics and all the talks had a great quality.
The most notable highlight was for sure the talk by Torkild Ulvøy Reshdeim from Itema AS (Norway). After introducing the new Eclipse Science Working Group, Torkild presented their Eclipse based simulation engine for oil platforms. He showed a live simulation of nautical environment changes which caused catastrophic accidents in the past.
Another interesting talk for me was the Microsoft Team Foundation Integration for Eclipse, I was surprised how well TFS integrates with Eclipse and that Microsoft now really seems to go more open routes, including encouraging companies to use Git.

Angelika Wittek and I showed a proof-of-concept of the redesign of the Eclipse Events page. The awesome thing about it is, that it uses MQTT and the Eclipse Paho Javascript library for bringing the event data to the webpage. The HiveMQ enterprise MQTT broker is used so it is trivial to use MQTT over Websockets thanks to its native MQTT Websocket support. It was great to see to get so many people interested in Eclipse IoT in general and MQTT in particular and I really enjoyed the discussions in the break and after the event.

For those interested, these are the slides we had for our presentation:

Democamp Stuttgart

Next stop was the Democamp in Stuttgart. What I like about the Stuttgart Democamp is, that it’s very practical and the speakers always tend to do much live coding, which is always fun. I was pleasantly surprised that there were 3 (!) out of 6 talks related to IoT and all of them covered MQTT, including the talk from Angelika Wittek and me.
My favourite demo was the „MQTT-Robot-Arm“ Demo by the Eclipse Franca Team which controlled a robot arm via a web page and MQTT. They generated two different backends and one frontend with Franca for the communication. If they would have used HiveMQ together with Paho.JS, the overall design would have been much simpler, though.

Democamp Vienna – Vienna Calling!

The last stop was the Democamp in Vienna. I was surprised that I got 40 minutes for the talk and so I decided to present something different than „just“ MQTT over websockets. The idea was to present the open source plugin system of HiveMQ. When I was sitting in the ICE train from Landshut to Vienna, I suddenly thought about the song „Vienna Calling“ by Falco and it just didn’t get out of my head. So I threw away my initial demo I prepared for the democamp and started hacking right away.

Honestly, this is my favourite demo I ever did: I demonstrated a very simple HiveMQ plugin which was able to actually call people after a MQTT message was sent to a specific topic. To make things more interesting, the called guy wouldn’t just get called by a robot, no, Falco himself would call and play his hit „Vienna Calling“. (Ok, actually Falco didn’t call but at least the song was played by the caller).

The democamp in Vienna was awesome, well organized and there was plenty of beer ;-). I had very interesting discussions and I enjoyed all the talks, especially the talk about Eclipse Oomph by Eike Stepper and Ed Merks, you should definitely check it out if you are a Eclipse User.

If you’ve never an Eclipse Democamp before, you should definitely consider visiting one near you, people and speaker are usually awesome at Eclipse Events and you are definitely going to learn new and cool things.