Eclipse Democamp Mini-Tour 2014

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.

EclipseCon 2013

I’m back from the EclipseCon Europe in Ludwigsburg and it was a great conference, I met many new and old friends and had lots of fun. The conference was very well organized and as far as I heard it was the biggest EclipseCon Europe ever.

Although I didn’t visit all the sessions I wanted to attend (to many good conversations in the hallways!), I at least managed to see the keynotes. :-) The keynote „Single Points of Failure: The Human Element of Software Engineering“ by Brian Fitzpatrick was brilliant. Very entertaining and non-technical keynote.

The second keynote, „Scaling Pinterest“ by Marty Weiner was very insightful and I was amazed and shocked how fast some startups like Pinterest grow and which problems they have to solve. I think Weiner had every NoSQL database you can think of on his slides.

When visiting the conference, it was clear to everyone, that M2M was one of the most important topics this year. In fact, most people were surprised how fast the M2M ecosystem of Eclipse has grown the last two years. Many people (jokingly?) speculated when the number of M2M projects will surpass the „classic“ Eclipse projects.

I talked with many people about MQTT, Eclipse Paho and HiveMQ and it was great to see that most people didn’t know much about MQTT before and most of them got very excited about this neat little technology. I personally think the conference was a big success for Eclipse Paho, there was a workshop (Christian Götz and me) about Java Paho and Javascript Paho, there was a regular Session about Paho and many people were also talking about it on the hallways.

Also, the other M2M projects on Eclipse were parts of many discussions on the hallways. I personally think there is some confusion about the focus of all these projects, but luckily Benjamin Cabé did a session about all these M2M projects and hopefully cleared the confusion for some people.

Although there are many people aware of the M2M projects in the Eclipse universe and these projects gained attention and traction recently, I think we have a long way to go until the M2M projects of Eclipse get „mainstream enough“ to be an integral part of every (Java) developers toolbox. But if Eclipse continues to follow the path they chose with M2M, I’m confident there is an even brighter future for the M2M projects and Eclipse as Foundation in General.

The slides for my sessions are available here:

Bringing M2M to the web with Paho – Connecting Java devices and online Dashboards with MQTT
M2M for Java developers – MQTT with Eclipse Paho

Linuxtag 2010

Ich bin nun gerade vom Linuxtag 2010 aus Berlin zurückgekehrt und fand die Veranstaltung durch und durch gelungen. Laut Veranstaltern kamen ca. 11.600 Teilnehmer, welche ca. 300 Vorträge ansehen konnten. Ich persönlich finde, dass die Qualität der Vorträge fast durchgehend sehr gut war. Einziges Problem ist meiner Meinung nach, dass der Großteil der Sprecher nur 30 Minuten Redezeit hatten und deshalb konnten die meisten Themen nur an der Oberfläche kratzen. Eine der wenigen Ausnahmen war der Vortrag über Apache Hadoop, welcher vergleichsweise technisch gestaltet war, jedoch eine sehr hohe Qualität hatte. Hier noch eine kleine Zusammenfassung von ein paar ausgewählten von mir gesehenen Vorträgen. Ich führe hier aber nur die Highlights für mich auf, da manche Vorträge in meinen Augen informativer waren als andere.

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This Blog is going to be filled with tutorials, howtos and various other things from the world of IT by degrees. You will find primarily Java, Linux, Eclipse and miscellaneous howtos, which could be mainly interesting for software developers and people who are interested in IT.