Acceleo next version

For the next version of Acceleo included in Indigo, we are working on several items, following is a presentation of some of them.

• Ant and maven easy integration

Currently you could easily use Acceleo as standalone, but if you need to integrate the acceleo compilation or generation in your workflow it's a bit difficult. So we are working on providing ant tasks and better maven support.

• Documentation of your generators

We add documentation capabilities for query, module and template. Documentation will be available on mouse over and during code completions. You have also support of deprecated tag with proper warning in case of use.

• Improved performances

You will have the ability to compile modules as binary resources. It will reduce significantly the size of compiled modules and increase the performances. This serialization will be the default one, but it could be modified in the preferences.

By the way we organize a BoF this evening about Acceleo, come on to discuss with us !

GSoC 2011 @ Eclipse

This year again, Eclipse applied as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code. We already have been started to collect ideas, they could be contributed on the wiki.

Do not miss GSoC !

It's a great opportunity to see enhancements or new features added to your favorite projects. If you are a student, you should consider GSoC as an awesome chance to integrate free and open-source communities by doing (not only using), trust a former student. If you don't know how to get involved, have a look to our contribute page and keep an eye on the timeline.

Here are some ideas I added :

Acceleo has the ability to profile a generation. It creates a model containing the profiling data, and his able to display it. However it would be nice if we could export this model to a gprof file and reuse existing analysis tools such as the view from the linux tools project.

Thanks to its discovery UI modeling package users could very easily discover and install modeling components. However we miss an updated reference example to see how to use together all this technologies.

EMF Serialization is extensible and Protocol Buffers is an efficient serialization technology so it could be interesting to see how to combine them.

Graphical modeling @ EclipseCon 2011

If your read this blog entry, you probably already heard about EMF, but you may still wondering how modeling and all this meta stuffs could help you in your daily developer work.


If you are in this case, then you have to attend to the EMF tutorial for at the next EclipseCon. In the first part you will have time to discover the basics of EMF on a case sudy. In the second part you will have an overview of additional powerful technologies, such as EEF and GMF, 2 projects I will present related to being able to create and modify a model in a graphical manner.




EEF is a tool which enables one to generate sexy properties, but not only. It's a framework, which could be use to generate several kinds of user interface to edit your model.

It has been designed to be compatible with validation and transaction existing EMF components. Let's have a look to to see how you could easily generate an eclipse form editor in one click from your metamodel.





Even EEF if is a quite young project, it is already used in the industry and arouses interest with frequent questions on the newsgroup.

By the way EEF has been nominated and is finalist for the eclipse community award 2001 in the most innovative project category.




GMF is a project dedicated to the creation of diagram editors. It is split in 2 components, the runtime and the tooling.

The runtime connects GEF and EMF. It plugs your EMF model as the model in the GEF model-view-controler architecture and provides a diagram metamodel.

The tooling enables you to generate an editor based on the runtime.




The runtime has been designed for extensibility, you could extend it or redefine some parts very simply.

The tooling uses code templates, that you could extend to generate custom code. This enables you to keep your GMF models and the generated code always synchronized.

That's all for this EEF and GMF preview, if you want to know more, come to the tutorial !