Thursday, November 29, 2007

Eclipse DemoCamp

Last Thursday, November 22, Kevin and I went to an Eclipse DemoCamp in Toronto. Although it was cold and snowy, we had a good turnout of probably fifteen people or so. We got to see great presentations of EMF, CDT, Mylyn, and a test driven teaching environment called UTest.

Marcelo Paternostro from IBM showed how meta-models in EMF could be created, models generated and edited. It was an excellent introduction for an EMF newbie! Mike Kucera, also from IBM, showed the CDT parser extension provided for a variant of C called C99, and discussed how the CDT team, in the process of implementing the parser for C99, has now created an extensible framework for anyone wanting to contribute parsers to languages that are close to C. More about this here.

A group of students from the University of Toronto displayed a tool called UTest which allows students to submit tests to be run against a professor's solution for a programming assignment. The idea is to teach the students test driven development by writing tests against a known solution but, of course, without knowing the details of how the solution was implemented. Students essentially poke around for edge cases, what works and what doesn't by writing unit tests which they submit to the UTest server. The server runs the tests and reports the results (pass/fail) back to the student. Students can use the information gleaned from the test results to write their solution to the assignment. I wish I had this tool when I was in school!

I was unfortunately not able to stay for the Mylyn demo, the last of the evening :-(

Thanks to Chris Recoskie for organizing this event. I recommend it if you have a DemoCamp happening in your city.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a small world indeed...I found this blog from one of my prof's blogging about Kushal's reaction to UTest, which is part of the 49x courses here at UofT.

If not only for the weather and distance, I would've went to Eclipse DemoCamp as well. Perhaps a different location next time (hopefully closer to Toronto) would be better. BTW, feel free to come down to one of the many DemoCamps here in TO as well. Be nice to see some familiar faces from IBM.

BTW, what happened to the video? :)

Kushal Munir said...

Hey Geofrey, it's great to hear from you :-) How's school treating you?

Glad you found this post. Please spread the word. I hadn't known about other DemoCamps in TO. Are these UofT events?

Will keep you posted on the video :-)

Kevin Doyle said...

Hey Geofrey,

It's too bad you couldn't make it to the Eclipse DemoCamp. Would have been great to see you. Hope you are doing well.

Anonymous said...

Hey Kushal,

Semester's almost over, so I barely can't wait for the holiday break..How's jazz doing these days? I hope everything's going fine on your end. Maybe I'll come to Eclipse DemoCamp whenever you guys are presenting jazz.

Anyways, there's tons of DemoCamps happening at Toronto (there's even one for just facebook), and they are not necessarily UofT-affiliated (I say "necessarily" because some volunteers are from UofT).

As for spreading the word, I've been telling all my friends about TM and they like it! esp. when most projects I have involves eclipse in some way, it's really convenient using it for uploading/dl'ing files from school (other than the few bugs).

Kevin: How you doing man? Hope you're doing fine as well, esp exam season :) I'll try to catch up on the next Eclipse DemoCamp

Anyways, great to chat with you guys. I'll talk to you guys soon. Say hello to George P. for me.

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