Eclipse Summit Europe 2010 - The last day

Today is the last day of the Eclipse Summit Europe 2010.

3^rd Key Note by Günter Dueck on the industrialization of the services sector

The world is getting industrialized and professionalized – the required level of mastership is continuously increasing. What does this mean for the different service sectors?

Günter shows IBM’s vision of a Smarter Planet “the world is getting smarter – the area of IT usage is exploding”. Many of today’s systems have to be overhauled and can or will be replaced with smarter solutions over time. This will have a substantial impact on all sectors of the services industry.

It will be possible to work everywhere … this is not yet possible. But once the coverage is there then this will change the world substantially. It will be possible to work at home; this will have an impact on industrial and private real estate ecosystem. No need to go to the office each day … video conferencing and alike will be standard. So other sectors like health care or energy can use this. As there is no need to go to the office on a daily base also the supporting sectors like restaurants, etc. will be affected as they will have fewer customers showing up, which will affect their suppliers, and so on.

Devices like energy meters will become smarter – and they will be attached to the internet. This will enable individual energy consumption statistics for each device and allow optimizing the energy consumption. But it will also enable the devices to send out notifications and to receive instructions. Somewhere companies will collect the data and provide condensed views to the customers allowing to oversee and control their infrastructure from their mobile devices.

Cars move towards electronic engines. This will change the car industry and the universities too which focus today mainly on engines burning fossil energy. But changing the engine does also impact other parts of the car as less vibration; less heat and noise are produced. So also the car suppliers have to change.

Also health care will change once devices are wired up as it becomes possible to analyze data samples somewhere on the world. So it becomes possible to look at all the patients which need the same treatment and provide industrialized advice to all of them. Some of these devices will be used actively to control treatment and to inject medicine which means that they can be remotely controlled.  Many of the standard treatments will be possible from somewhere in the world.

Having faster networks allows concentrating data centers. The workload shifts to these centers – at least the work which has to be done onsite. The other can be done from remote … by the people with the highest degree of professionalism at the lowest cost.

The people can browse information – they can we very well informed before using a service. Even today it is often easier to be better informed on a specific topic than a so called specialists or advisors in a company. This means that also that part of the services sector will change.

All professions will be split in routine and premium parts. Routine will move to the cloud and disappear … premium will stay.  So identifying and being engaged in “premium services” is the key question.

More from Günter Dueck on this can be found in his book “Lean Brain Management”.

Models To Go

Different mobile devices have different characteristics, programming paradigms and API’s. To create a neutral model and use a generator for the different phone platforms is a way to avoid the need to perform individual platform specific coding. Itemis has developed such a language using Xtext. The language contains the required abstractions and has a Java like look and feel to make developers feel comfortable. Xpand is then used to translate the model in to the app for the respective devices.

Building a UI styling language for E4 with Xtext

Xtext is used for CSS styling. The approach bases on Xbase. Xbase predefines a Java like expression language which can be embedded into Xtext based languages. Xbase seems very interesting for

Language development and Java oriented code generators. No other language bindings are planned at the moment.

Sphinx

Sphinx is an industrial strength tool platform for the model driven development of embedded systems which covers the full life cycle. For this the parallel support of multiple standards and DSL’s is required. There are two major initiatives: Artop and Papyrus. Both initiatives have platforms which offer generic modeling platform services. The idea of Sphinx is to provide a common base for these two but also other industry strength modeling tools.

Sphinx provides many of the services envisioned by the Eclipse Enterprise Modeling Platform.  The project is currently in the created state with the vision to integrate it into the Eclipse Enterprise Modeling Platform.  A lot of efforts went into dealing with the problems around the traditional file orientation of the Eclipse modeling environment and move the focus in the IDE to models.

Modeling in the cloud

Ed Merks starts by talking about his experiences learning the Google Web Toolkit. GWT comes with a fantastic Eclipse integration and it’s is based on Java.

A major difference is the asynchronous way how resources and alike are accessed in the cloud. This means that a request is sent and that there eventually follows an event with the response. This is visible in the generated applications. The example application shown in the presentation can be found under http://library-editor.appspot.com/ in the cloud.

Some rumors say that Ed did prepare the presentation in a plane. More details are here.

The end

 

This is the end of the ESE 2010.