Modeling Symposium Program

As previously announced there will be an exciting modeling symposium during EclipseCon Europe.

Thursday, November 3rd
  from 18:30 to 20:30
Silchersaal

• Xtext 2.1 by Sven Efftinge
  
  
  
    Xtext 2.1 allows to define languages for the JVM by just implementing two simple scripts.
  In this short demo, I'll show an example of using this new API. You'll see what these scripts are about
  and how awesome the the resulting language and its IDE support is.
  
  
•  OCL by Ed Willlink
  
  
  
     The evolution of the MDT/OCL project from Java-only model support to an
  OCL IDE will be briefly described. The extensive use of Acceleo and Xtext
  for auto-generation of both Eclipse OCL and the OMG OCL specification will
  be outlined. Finally the OCL 2 Java code generator will be announced
  eliminating parsing costs at run-time and accelerating execution by one to
  two orders of magnitude
  
  

• Acceleo Interpreter by Stéphane Bégaudeau
  
  
  
    I would start by the presentation of the new Acceleo interpreter view with its different features. I'll show how it can be used to execute OCL queries on EMF based models. Then I'll highlight its integration with Acceleo by using it combined with the Acceleo debugger. Finally, I'll explain how this view, that has strictly speaking, no dependencies with Acceleo can be used by other projects with a small example of its use without Acceleo to support another language.
  
  
• .EMF-IncQuery by István Ráth
  
    This presentation introduces EMF-IncQuery, a declarative and scalable EMF model query framework. EMF-IncQuery uses a graph query language, and provides incremental query evaluation by caching the results of the model queries and incrementally maintaining the cache when the underlying EMF model changes. Furthermore, the EMF-IncQuery framework can be easily integrated into existing EMF-based applications in a non-intrusive way. During the talk, we quickly overview how easy it is to define and integrate highly scalable model queries into existing EMF-based applications, in the form of a very short live demonstration using the MDT Papyrus modeling tool. The scalability of the engine will also be demonstrated, with on-the-fly constraint revalidation that takes less than 100 milliseconds over large AUTOSAR models with over 1 million elements.
  
  
  
• EMF Store Demo by Maximilian Koegel
  
  
  
    EMFStore is a model repository for EMF and allows to collaboratively
  edit EMF models and keep a version history. EMFStore can be integrated
  into EMF-based RCP applications to provide the application with its
  capabilities. In this demo we will show an industrial customer application where EMFStore was integrated and inspect the code that was required to do so.
  
  
  
• EMF Profiles by Hugo Brunelière
  
  
  
  
    Have you ever been in a situation in which you would like to annotate an EMF model with additional information, but the last thing you wanted to do was to change its metamodel to made that possible? I bet the answer is yes for almost anybody that has been using EMF for a while. In this talk I will present  EMF Profiles a solution inspired from UML Profiles which provide a light-weight model annotation mechanism.
  
  
• MPS by Markus Völter
  
  
  
  
    JetBrains MPS is a powerful language workbench available under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses projectional editing, so it supports quite flexible syntax as well as language modularization and composition. Best of all, the development roadmap include an integration with Eclipse in the context of version 3.0. In this slot, I will give you a short demo of what MPS can do.

Hope to see you there !
If you would like to be included in this program, please contact us .

Modeling Symposium

In previous years, the Modeling Symposium at Eclipse meetings in Europe attracted a large panel of attendees interested in sharing their ideas and in learning about the projects of others in the community. At the last event, we had fifteen interesting presentations and the room was full.

This year, there is no session planned for the symposium, so it will take place during a BoF on

Thursday, November 3rd
at 19:00 

If you are interested to show a demo, exchange ideas, or gather feedback about a proposal, please contact us with a short description about what you would like to talk. We hope being able to announce an exciting agenda.

Collaborative modeling, the new deal

 I already blogged about collaborative modeling but I would like to stand back from the previous post, which was very technical, and introduce the talk I will present with Martin and Benjamin at EclipseCon Europe.

Since several years now the Eclipse modeling platform provides useful tools which have help to democratize the use of modeling technologies. However those tools have raised issues linked to collaboration we start to better address.

To visualize and edit models in a graphical manner diagrams are often used. However  usually diagramming technologies do not scale well and this is problematic as the more the models and their complexity grow the more one wants to work in group.

When you model with other people, one of the difficulty is to understand reasons behind their choices and design. Document them is of course necessary but the main difficulty is to keep documentation accurate across refactorings and changes.

In fact, often the more the time flies by, the more we lost the intention, documentation being seen as a post-design step.





Collaborate means dealing with concurrent accesses. To enable them you have two strategies. One is to prevent conflicts either through models splitting or with locks. But models splitting is not well supported by tools and coarse-grained locks are not pratical.

 

The other strategy is to allows conflict happens and deals with them when they occurs. It looks like a dice game, and depending on the frequency, it could become hard to deal with conflicts.

Interested by the subject ? Come to the talk to discover what are the available technologies to address those concerns, and understand why collaboration matters in modeling.

EclipseCon Europe submissions advice

EclipseCon Europe submissions deadline is approaching, and I received already several advice requests. So it's time to share some hints for increasing chance of being accepted. Just a reminder before the enumeration, we are several people in the program committee, and every one of us has his opinion and his sensibility, so do not blame me if your talk is finally not accepted.

• Read the submission FAQs 
• Submit before August 3, 2011, you talk may be accepted early ! Early bird winners will be advertised on the website, and speakers will receive a special gift. 

  Photo from Magnethy

• If you submit a talk about well known Eclipse Project, or a talk already presented several times, consider an original presentation format.
• Blog about your submission to give further details and provide us some screenshots if it's worthwile. You may also receive interesting feedback.
• Be reactive if the committee ask you details about your submission.

Hope to read you soon.

EclipseCon Europe needs you

  I have always appreciated Eclipse events, and see them as a great opportunity to meet the community. I think that from connections made over frosty beverages could emerge new ideas and durable collaborations. This year the convention in europe will celebrate 10 years of Eclipse, it's an unique chance for measuring the road we have traveled, but also to discuss about the future and new ways to explore :

Photo from FlyingSinger

But August 17 is approaching and if you dot have done it yet, it's time for a submission. To not miss accidentaly deadlines there is even a calendar you may import.

Last but not least there will be Java 7 summit organized by Oracle this year, another reason to come.

Highlights from ESE

ESE is already over, and from this edition I would like to retain 3 things :

• Community is open and diverse

Photo from Cliff

Eclipse is a community, and ESE is an awesome opportunity to meet in real life members of Eclipse community. I have found that the attendance was a good mix of committers, adopters and end users which lead to interesting discussion and feedback about projects and technologies. I have liked the accessibility and open mindedness of every person I met.

• Modeling is everywhere

It was impressive to see that people have understood that modeling is not limited to UML and code generation.

On a textual side Xtext and Acceleo were the 2 stars with a lot of talks presenting their functionalities or exemplary usage. There was also a tutorial combining them to learn how to use these 2 great technologies to model and generate android applications.

On graphical side, there were plenty of eye candy things to see. EEF presentation from Goulwen showed how you could easily generate sexy properties and wizards for a metamodel. Mitra, a semi-automated model transformation tool, presentation showed a 3D user interface where each model is displayed on a 2D plane. I am not sure this is scalable but it was a great demo of what's can be done with GEF3D. Papyrus presentation showed the progress they have made in providing an UML (but not limited to it) reference graphical editor. Bonita Open Solution presentation showed a very attractive and intuitive BPMN editor. In its presentation of modeling for WTP, Etienne showed briefly modelers build with Obeo Designer, our DSL Studio on top of the eclipse modeling platform. Papyrus, Bonita Open Solution, and Obeo Designer relies on the GMF Runtime. Graphiti is a new alternative runtime, and its presentation was a demo of a beautiful library modeler. Last but not least and good transition, Dawn demo of collaborative edition between editors, including diagram ones was amazing.

Model management concerns had a very good coverage this year. CDO is aimed at scalability, sharing and storage of models and Eike presentation about it was very comprehensive. The more I know about CDO, the more I find it well-designed. COPE focus on models migration and its presentation pointed up the advanced tooling they provide to facilitate metamodel evolution. EMF Store is dedicated to models storage and versioning. It uses EMF Compare for comparison and COPE for migration. A talk and a poster were presented.

Other great stuffs were presented like collaboration of EMF and GWT for modeling in the cloud, or Sphinx an initiative to have a more coherent modeling platform.

According to this the modeling symposium was a real success. Many talks on various topics from different speakers. My only regret is that with such a crowd, it was a bit difficult to start a discussion just after a talk, but that's probably the price of fame.

• Build simplification is moving forward
  

Photo from jolien_vallins

In past I had some headaches with eclipse build technologies. There are several approaches and several projects (PDE Build, Athena, Pluginbuilder, Buckminster, B3), but I think that the gap with them to create and maintain a build remains quite high. The demo I have seen from Pascal of tycho, let me think that it's a promising approach as I have found that it hides the complexity.

Of course there was lot of other pretty cool talks and demos, like the Jeff Noris keynote, that you missed if you weren't at ESE this year. See you next time !

GEF support in SWTbot and GMF

Back from ESE where I gave my presentation about GEF support in SWTBot last week, I am happy to announce that GEF feature is available in SWTBot update site. Thanks Ketan for that.




Quite obviously there are several bugs opened and there is room for improvement but current API is not frozen, so it's time to test and ask for enhancements !

On GMF side I updated yesterday its main wiki page to use tabs. There is a lot of valuable information available on the wiki for GMF, but it was scattered. I hope you find the new page clearer and useful.