Back from ESE

I'm back in reality and just recap what happened the last 4 days.

My talks

Let me first recap my talks. I think all in all they went quite well though there are always things to improve (it was my first time doing a talk my own)

E4 - Modeling the workbench

I think I never talked to so many people ever before because I did my presentation in the biggest room available.I think I got the message around what the E4 project is about and in particular what the subtask-team I'm in is doing. The first reviews tell me that I didn't fail but I look forward for more comments.After my talk many people showed up personally. From what I can tell they agree with us about heading in the right direction. I think I even got the message about the joy, passion and openess the current E4-team is working together around that good that people think about joining us and bring in their own vision about the future of the Eclipse Platform. Hope to see you soon showing up at the E4-Mailing list.

Datacentric RCP with EMF and Databinding

I did the presentation in the 2nd biggest room and there even haven't been enough chairs for all people who wanted to attend my talk so they had to stand in the back. Woohoo.

I felt more comfortable speaking without a microphone and I think I showed people when mixing the right Eclipse technologies it's possible to write Enterprise ready Database frontends.

I admit my presentation was a bit focused about UI (Key-Binding, UI-Contexts, Commands) and not so how to access data. The only review I found until now is a short sentence in Ed Merks blog where people told him that the talk was "really good". So looking forward for more comments. I think the small application I presented there is what many people requested on the "E4-symposia" when they asked about a best practice example.

I even thought about restarting on an accompanying book about all the stuff one can find in the example and technologies but dismissed this thought immediately because I simply don't have the time and financial grounding to spend my time on it. The time (=money) my small company is investing in Eclipse is big enough already.

Conclusion

I would appreciate to get more comments about my presentation and ask myself why the same we had one EclipseCon was done where people got small pieces of paper to give back comments.

I think the intention was that people use gPublication to do so but it looks like people don't know about this. So if you want to give feedback and get access to the slides please do so at:

• E4-Modeling the workbench: here


• Datacentric RCP: here

but I'm afraid not all people attending my talks are really following my blog or the Planet so the feedback is going to be less than it was on EclipseCon.

If you and your company need help to get started with Eclipse RCP and other Eclipse technologies like OSGi, the modeling stack like (EMF, Teneo, CDO) my company is offering consultancy and development resources to anyone interested.

The E4 symposia

The symposia once more was I think a well received offer of Eclipse Summit Europe to the community and we talked about a lot different things in the E4 space. Boris Bokowski summarized the symposia in here.

For me as someone taking part in E4 project it is important to get feedback from the community to integrate their wishes (if my time permits) in the code base.

Socializing

I got to know my new people and we had a lot of interesting chats about new ideas (e.g. declarative ui) so it's hard to get back to reality and working on all those boring stuff.

Rotating Image in a PaintListener

For those who have a better understanding of matrices and 2-D graphics this may sound strange but today I struggeled about 2 hours rotating an image in a PaintListener.

Let me first of explain the exercise I had to solve, then show you my solution and then maybe someone can point out a better one.

Exercise

Draw an Image at Point(50,50) in a Canvas which is rotated a variable angle.

The solution

Solveing this problem one can use a SWT-Transform to adjust the Graphics-Context looks straight forward but it took me like said 2 hours to wrap my head around the problem. The following function is the solution I came up with.

public void paintControl(PaintEvent e) {
  GC gc = e.gc;
  gc.setAdvanced(true);
  
  Bounds b = image.getBounds();

  Transform transform = new Transform(display);
  // The rotation point is the center of the image
  transform.translate(50 + b.width/2, 50 + b.height/2);
  // Rotate
  transform.rotate(45);
  // Back to the orginal coordinate system
  transform.translate(-50 - b.width/2, -50 - b.height/2);
  gc.setTransform(transform);
  gc.drawImage(image, 50, 50);
  transform.dispose();
}

Is the solution right? Is there a better solution?

My skills are very very bad when it comes to matrices and 2-D graphics so the above solution to the problem might be completely wrong and only works by chance.