Modeling: From Zero to Seventy

Remember when no one had heard of EMF? When it was just Ed Merks, Frank Budinsky, and Dave Steinberg? Me neither.

These days modeling is everywhere, and with good reason. There are now a total of 70 people contributing to and committing for the various Modeling projects, the most recent additions being from MDT (Papyrus, BPMN2), EMF (CDO), and TMF (Xtext).

So, is it any surprise that there are 29 Modeling Track talks this year at EclipseCon, from the introductory Mega Modeling Mania BoF to the double-black-diamond GMF and QVT: roads (finally) crossed?

And that's not even including a couple of e4 talks about The Modeled UI in Eclipse e4 and The e4 Programming Model Across Web and Desktop or one about Designing an Android Domain Specific Modeling Language using EMF, GEF and GMF!

I guess some people are just unbearably stupid, eh?

Multiple monitors & screen real estate

Reading Seva Lapsha's blog got me thinking about my multi-monitor screen usage today. In the past, depending on the type of work I'm doing, I might have one monitor for code and another for testing... eg., Eclipse + a browser for web testing, or main dev Eclipse + a second eclipse for plugin testing, etc.

Or multiple Eclipse instances sharing plugins (one with a workspace which actually contains plugins, the other with a second, empty workspace in which the other projects are imported with Import > Existing Projects). (Why? To keep the contents of the workspaces smaller and to make startup faster, esp. considering bugs like this happy li'l PDT bug.) :)

Since the Eclipse 4.0 path has now started, here's a few ideas for ways to improve the UI experience. I'd like to see Eclipse one day work like GIMP, where detached views show up in the task bar (or maybe they do, it's just KDE that's filtering them? -- I can ALT-TAB between detached windows, but I only see one Eclipse item in my task bar). Or allow detached views to dock against each other into composite view blobs like they do when they're not detached. Or allow me to grab a set of docked tabbed views and detach them all in one go, instead of having to drag each one out, one by one. Or, even better, just let the whole editor area be detachable. And while we're at it, how about the toolbars?

If anyone else agrees with these ideas, please consider opening a bug to track them. Or better yet, bug your PMC so you can become a committer on E4 and contribute to the work effort.

At any rate, I agree with Seva: putting all your panels on one screen and the editor on the other is certainly a handy way to take advantage of all those extra pixels, esp. when your 20" 1600x1200 monitor dies and you're stuck dropping back to a 19" 1280x1024 one. :(