Xtext meets Athena

The weather reports look pretty good for TMF Xtext: The sun has been shining for a few builds and hopefully this trend will continue.

Due to the fact, that the emft buildserver will be down permanently from August, 5th, Dennis migrated the Xtext build to the modeling integration server, which is more powerful and faster then the previous integration system. This worked out pretty well, but we ended up with the very same problem as before: One of our test projects tends to break the build because of an untrapped exception in the compiler. As we have no idea about the reasons of this sudden breakdown - the build was successful for a long time and broke one day without any recognizable modification or log entry, we decided to look out for other possibilities to run our integration tests.

One promising option was the Eclipse build server. After we got the build slots for the Athena common build, which is powered by the Hudson continuous integration engine, we gave it a serious try. Dennis did some night shifts to create the configuration for the Xtext build, Xpand and MWE and finally all three projects were green. That was a very good feeling.

It was straight forward to define dependencies on required projects that will trigger dependent builds and to configure schedules for nightly builds. My overall impression is, that this infrastructure is easier to handle than the modeling build, it's definitly a step forward. What I like most - besides the easy configuration and the fact that it just builds our project - are the neat statistics and the weather report icons that indicate the trend of a project. Maybe we finally heralded the summer?

Xtext 0.7.1 is in the starting blocks

After an exciting Eclipse Galileo release, some celebrating and catching up a lot of sleep we decided to have a bugfix release short after Xtext 0.7.0 to incorporate some fixes that we had in the pipeline but that accidently didn't make it into the final Galileo build. The 0.7.1 release of TMF Xtext is scheduled for Friday, 17th of July, 2009 and it will contain more than 20 fixes and a few minor features that will improve the usability for both mouse and keyboard addicted users.

Thanks for all the valuable feedback that helped us to decide about the important issues that existed in the first release of TMF Xtext. Without the various complaints, questions and suggestions of our users in the newsgroup, the reports in the bugtracker and the responses via twitter, it would have been much more difficult to know where the shoe pinches.

Special thanks go to Alex from itemis Leipzip who visited us for one week in July to learn about the new version Xtext. Thereby he provided much feedback and told us about somewhat unexpected use cases. We could cover many topics about Xtext and beyond and it was great fun to learn about other people's experiences with the framework and to provide immediate help whenever possible.