Yesterday the first Hackcamp Wolfsburg took place at the Schiller 40. Steven Schwenke did a great job to organize and prepare the event. Despite the fact that only 5 persons, including myself, attended the event it has been a great success. Beneath my coworkers Kevin and Niko from NeosIT and Steven from MSG, Carsten from Eves IT was involved.

Steven started with his JavaFX workshop which gave us a good introduction what can be done with JavaFX. I was working with JavaFX the first time and realized that the framework is cool but there are some drawbacks: Inconsistent APIs, no easy option to import own components in Scene Builder, a missing marketplace for FX components, no reflection of bean properties inside the scene builder and so on. Nevertheless, it gave me a really good start. During lunch time we ordered pizza @Joeys and watched some very funny videos of Joko and Klaas. Being pigged out I started my Xtext talk with a small presentation I hacked together during lunch. It was not the first time I hold a presentation about this topic and the reactions are almost every time the same if the listeners are developers without experience in code generation or modelling: “WTF is he talking about?”. Sooner or later I must prepare an easy introduction presentation, but it is not so easy at all to give a methodical valuable start.

After the presentation with lot of Meta in it we implemented a small project I prototyped together with a customer. As we went along with the coding, the attendees got the idea of code generation and modelling and realized the possibilites what can be done with Xtext. I *really* like this moment 😉 I pointed Steven towards XtendFX and we did talk a lot about possibile applications. I was really surprised that the session took longer than I expected. Thanks for listening and the very interesting discussion!

At the end Karsten showed us JBoss Forge. At a first glance it looked like Spring Roo. I have to take a further look the next days.

After eight hours of hacking and talking I was really wasted but in a good way. I am looking forward to the next Hackcamp and want to thank all participants for making it such a good event!

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