On Recurring Rage...

It's happening all over again! For the first time ever! Embarcadero is hosting another virtual conference, but this time for the dataheads out there (you know who you are). Dubbed  "DataRage", this  virtual conference is three days of online technical sessions focused on database development and data management issues. And, like its CodeRage predecessors, it's free. Looking at the agenda, it's nice to see that so many sessions are about one of my products, ER/Studio. You ought to check it out.

Speaking of ER/Studio, the last time I blogged (wow, has it really been that long?), I had just arrived in Iaşi for a couple of weeks of planning with my ER/Studio development team. While watching this past Sunday's episode of The Amazing Race (which took place in Romania), I was reminded that I haven't yet posted the pictures I promised to share. So, here goes nothing.

Târgu Secuiesc

We started out on a 1000 km trek across the Romanian countryside early on a Saturday morning. Really early. After a few of hours of driving, we decided to stop for breakfast in a quaint town called Târgu Secuiesc. It had some of the most colorful buildings I saw during my two-week stay in Romania.

This town is in the part of Romania where the majority of the population is of Hungarian descent There was a statue of a famous Hungarian hero, Áron Gábor, in the square near where we parked the car.

Bran

Now that our stomachs were full, we set out to do what all good tourists do when in Transylvania - find Dracula. What better place to find Dracula than in what's come to be known as "Dracula's Castle", near Bran?

We were a little disappointed to find out that the castle seemed to be more about Queen Maria than the famous vampire. But, we were happy to have seen it nonetheless, as evidenced by the smiles on our faces, below. Here, you can see some of the key members of the ER/Studio management team - me (Program Manager, Modeling and Design Solutions), Kim Ouye (Vice President, Development), Jim Brodrick (Director, Development), and Jason Hahn (Software Development Manager, ER/Studio).

Braşov

Our next stop was Braşov, where we planned to spend the night. We took what we were told would be a 20 minute walk (yeah, right) to a cable car from which we could get a vista of the old part of the city.

After getting a bird's eye view, we spent the evening wandering around the cobblestone streets. One of the highlights was the famous "Black Church" (Biserica Neagră) , which ironically (given its age - it dates back to 1477) sported a clock dated 1999.

Sighişoara

The next day, we set out to find the birthplace of the inspiration for Dracula, Vlad the Impaler. He was allegedly born in the citadel of Sighişoara.

This medieval city was probably my favorite stop on our adventure. Its landmark is the Clock Tower, which was built in 1360.

Bicaz Canyon

We spent the rest of Sunday returning back to Iaşi through the Bicaz Canyon in the Eastern Carpathian Mountains. Our first stop along the way was at Red Lake (Lacul Roşu) whose name comes from the reddish alluvia deposited in the lake by the Red Creek. Kim (our VP) told us that, on previous visits, he had both walked around the lake and paddled on the lake, and now he wanted to walk on the lake. Before we could stop him he was wandering out on the ice in the middle of the lake.

Our last stop in the mountains was Lake Bicaz, the largest artificial lake in the interior of Romania. Kim mentioned there was restaurant that he was told was located "in the middle of the lake". We found it, but discovered that, while not quite in the middle of the lake, it was in the lake - on a boat. Unfortunately it was closed, so after enjoying the view for a bit, we headed back to Iaşi.

On Vision...

I met an elderly woman in the United Express check-in line yesterday. Unprompted, she proceeded to tell me how she came all the way from New Mexico to spend a week with a man she had met over the Internet. She had come to Ottawa on blind faith that things would work out. They didn't.

After nearly a year and a half of employment with Embarcadero, it was finally time that I made my inaugural visit to the epicentre of the company's product development. I placed my faith in the pilots and crew of several aircraft over the past day or so, with the expectation that they'd get me safely to Washington, then Vienna, and, eventually, Iasi. They did.

How many of the personal or professional things that you do depend on blind faith? Do you have faith that your doctors are doing all they can do to help preserve your well-being? Do you have faith that your employees are really working when they work from home? Do you have faith that your executive team is taking the company where it needs to go? Some things are out of our hands, but others are not.

At Embarcadero, we don't rely on blind faith to decide where our products are going. We rely on vision. As a program manager, much of my job is about vision. Just as Scott McCloud says, we program managers strive to learn from everyone (especially our Product Advisory Council, or PAC), follow no one, watch for patterns, and work like hell.

As I embark on a week of project planning here in Iasi, and think about what's in store for our customers in 2009, I can't help but be excited about what the future will bring. What are you doing to understand your future? Do you have a vision?

On the Last Year of the Ohties...

Some have started this New Year by posting a list of their most popular blog entries from 2008. I've decided instead to enter (albeit a little late) the last year of the ohties (in this century) with a wordle of my blog.

I guess it's obvious what's occupied my time over the past year. It'll be interesting to see how different it will look a year from now...

On EclipseCon Idol...

The submission deadline for EclipseCon 2009 has come and gone, and now the program committee has the unpleasant duty of selecting from among the many excellent submissions. But, like all good reality shows, you, the "viewer", get to provide input on what you think should be selected. Don't let your favorite submissions "get sent home"! Providing feedback will not only make the program committee's job easier, but will help ensure that the talks YOU want to see make it onto the program.

I've submitted several proposals this year (see below), and I'd like your feedback. Please follow the link to the EclipseCon submission system to post any comments you may have.

#272 Building RESTful Java Applications with EMF

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. However, it is possible to design any enterprise software system in accordance with the REST architectural style without using the HTTP protocol and without interacting with the World Wide Web. Systems that follow the principles of REST often referred to as RESTful. Proponents of REST argue that the Web enjoyed the scalability and growth that it has had as a direct result of a few key design principles. Among these principles are the notions that application state and functionality are divided into resources and that every resource is uniquely addressable using a universal syntax for use in hypermedia links. Another key principle of REST is that all resources share a uniform interface for the transfer of state between client and resource, consisting of a constrained set of content types and a constrained set of well-defined operations.

The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) provides a Java runtime framework and tools for generative application development and fine-grained data integration based on simple models. Models can be specified directly using EMF's metamodel, Ecore, or imported from other forms, including UML and XML Schema. Given a model specification, EMF can generate a corresponding set of Java interfaces and implementation classes that can easily be mixed with hand-written code for maximum flexibility. When deployed, applications developed with EMF benefit from a powerful and extensible runtime, which, among other features, includes a persistence mechanism which has always supported the principles of REST – perhaps even before the term "REST" became popular.

This tutorial will provide an introduction to EMF, including alternatives for specifying a model, EMF's code generation tools, and key runtime framework concepts. As a practical usage of this knowledge, the presenters will show how EMF can be used to build RESTful applications, exploring some best practices for working with resources and other features of the framework.

#273 What's New in MDT?

The Model Development Tools (MDT) project focuses on big "M" modeling within the Modeling project; its purpose is twofold: 1) to provide an implementation of industry standard metamodels and 2) to provide exemplary tools for developing models based on those metamodels. Since its launch in September of 2006, MDT has undergone two major releases and is now working towards its third release as part of the 2009 Galileo Simultaneous Release. This short talk will provide an overview of the new features and components/projects in MDT and give an update on the status of its Galileo release.

#274 Data Modeling at Eclipse

In order to enable the much needed agility demanded by today’s marketplace, business functions and associated processes must be supported by semantically accurate and reusable information, i.e. data and its associated metadata. A data model is an abstract model that describes how data is represented and accessed. Data modeling is the process of creating a data model instance by applying a data model theory, typically to solve some business enterprise requirement.

Data model instances can be categorized into various levels or perspectives, including contextual data models which identify entity classes, conceptual data models which define the meaning of things in the organization, logical data models which describe the logical representation of properties without regard to particular data manipulation technology, physical data models which describe the physical means by which data are stored, data definitions which represent the coding language of the schema on the specific development platform, and data instantiations which hold the values of the properties applied to the data in a schema.In this short talk, we’ll take a look at examples of each of these kinds of data models and explore how they are supported by projects/components at Eclipse.

#275 UML? E/R? Let's Call the Whole Thing Off!

There is a long standing rift between software modelers and data modelers. You say class, I say entity; you say property, I say attribute; you say association, I say relationship; etc.. This long talk will take a candid look at the differences (and similarities) between UML and E/R modeling, and offer insight into what is being, or could be, done at Eclipse and elsewhere to reconcile the two. You might be surprised to learn that the divide between software modelers and data modelers isn't as great as you thought.

#276 Eclipse and the OMG: The Morning After

Last year, two symposia were held jointly by Eclipse and the OMG to focus on the synergies between open source and open specifications and to discuss how the joint future of Eclipse and the OMG can be shaped. By all accounts, both were quite successful. So, now what? Well, a lot of really useful feedback was shared, but not much has changed since then. The bottom line is that the status quo will no longer suffice. Design by committee and vendor politics won't get anyone anywhere. Neither will closedness and opaqueness. This long talk will review the feedback from the first two symposia and will compare and contrast the Eclipse and OMG ecosystems to identify concrete measures that can be taken to improve the state of affairs.

On Rage...

No, I'm not talking about anger (although, not unlike Ian, I do sometimes feel the need to rant)... I'm talking about CodeRage III, CodeGear's annual virtual developer conference (hosted by Embarcadero Technolgies). It's happening right now. All week. And it's free. Details can be found on the session schedule page. Which sessions have you attended? Which ones do you plan to attend? Did I mention that it's free? ;)

In case you're interested, Ed Merks and I will be delivering Eclipse-related sessions at CodeRage III on Wednesday. My session, entitled "Towards Data Model Interchange and Traceability", is from 5:45 pm to 6:45 pm PST. I know, it's late for those of us on the East coast... but hey, this is a global conference! Ed will be giving his infamous stupid modeling talk ("The Unbearable Stupidity of Modeling") right after mine, from 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm PST. Hope to "see" you there! Rage on!

On December 3...

It's been especially difficult for me to keep my head above water these days. So much is going on, at times it's hard to decide what to focus on and when. Eclipse Summit Europe was already two weeks ago now, the Ottawa DemoCamp was last Thursday, submissions for EclipseCon 2009 were due on Friday, CodeRage III is this week, and there's an OMG Technical Meeting next week. I'll try to blog about each of these if/when I find a spare moment...

And that's just conferences. In terms of my "day job", this is a big week for modeling and design solutions at Embarcadero. Three of my products, ER/Studio, ER/Studio Enterprise Portal, and EA/Studio are all releasing new versions on Wednesday. I've blogged before about how lucky I am to be part of such a great team, but this time around the challenges we persevered were so numerous it was almost laughable. My partner in crime, Jason Tiret, will be hosting a webinar on Wednesday to talk about what's new in database modeling at Embarcadero. You ought to check it out!

On Ludwigsburg...

Wow, it's hard to believe that the last time I blogged was nearly two weeks ago. Where has the time gone? Seeing as I wrote my last blog entry from my hotel room in Reston, Virginia on the eve of EclipseWorld 2008, is seems rather fitting that I write this, my next blog entry, from my hotel room in Ludwigsburg, Germany, on the eve of Eclipse Summit Europe 2008. As a colleague of mine, who shall remain nameless, might say, "I'm so filled with joy for Eclipse Summit Europe that I cannot contain it!".

Like Ed, it looks as though I may need to clone myself in order to participate in everything I want to here at ESE. I haven't decided yet which talks I'll attend, but I suppose I had better do that soon, before things get really busy. At this point I know I'll be participating in the Eclipse Members' meeting tomorrow (Monday) and the Modeling Symposium on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, I'll be delivering two short talks. The first, entitled "Data Models at Eclipse", will provide an overview of the different kinds, or levels, of data models and explore how they are supported by projects/components at Eclipse. The second, "What's New in MDT?", will provide an overview of the Model Development Tools project and, in particular, some of its noteworthy recent additions. If you're going to be at the Summit, I hope to see you there. Of course, if you can't be there for whatever reason, you can always view the slides from the submission page(s)...