Modeling Symposium @ EclipseCon Europe 2011

The modeling symposium at EclipseCon Europe 2011 was really nice with several talks on various topics related to modeling. I would like to thank all presenters and particularly István who filmed all presentations with his smartphone.

• Xtext 2.1 by Sven Efftinge
  
  
  
  
  
• OCL by Ed Willlink
  
  
  
  Slides are also available.
  
  
  
• Acceleo Interpreter by Stéphane Bégaudeau
  
  
  
  
  
• EMF-IncQuery by István Ráth
  EMF-IncQuery EclipseCon Europe 2011 Modeling Symposium Talk
  
  
  
• EMF Store Demo by Maximilian Koegel
  
  
  
  
  
• EMF Profiles by Hugo Brunelière
  
  
  
  
  
• MPS by Markus Völter
  
  
  
  
  
• EMF Compare by Mikael Barbero
  
  
  
  
  
• EEF alternative generation by Goulwen Le Fur
  
  
  
  
  
• GMF Tooling revival by Mariot Chauvin
  
  
  
  

Collaborative modeling @ EclipseCon Europe 2011

Last week I presented with Martin and Benjamin why collaboration in modeling becomes an important concern, the issues we currently encounter, and the eclipse technologies which are improving to provide seamless collaboration.

	In the last five years models usage generalizes, modeling tools matured a lot, but often they have not be designed to allow one to work efficiently in team. On the same time, collaboration, in a general manner, took a predominant place in tools and medias. Successes of Wikipedia and the Huffington Post show that trend.
	Modeling or not, working with others is a challenge. Which separation of work ? Which rules to set up to keep the coherence ? How to deal with the different concerns people may have ? Answers are often most organizational than technical, however tools, technologies may constraint your organization and you way to work in collaboration.
	Model together is first dealing with a large amount of information and depending of your manner to represent them it could become quite tricky. For graphical representations, beyond layout problems, from a certain number of elements, we are not able to focus on the useful information, the signal noise ratio becomes to low.
	Even without representation scalability remains an issue, as by default EMF load the entire model in memory.
	How many times are we not able to understand legacy code or models done by others ? It is necessary to document your models and explains your choice behind design decision, but it is as important to keep documentation synchronized across the changes and refactorings you made.
	To collaborate means dealing with concurrent accesses, and often end users do not want to have to compare or to merge. Starting from that requirement you quite easily ends up with some kind of pessimistic strategy.
	The most simple implementation of this strategy is an instant messaging discussion. As long as your model is not changing too often its bearable.  Sophisticated versions of that implementation are directly integrated in an SCM supporting file locking, but that remains a not very elegant solution.
	From that you'll try to avoid blocking the whole team and then you'll split your model into many files. It's slightly better but it's not that easy to do, as you have to carefully design your Ecore model avoiding most of the cross references. More over EMF fragments are not correctly supported by many tools.
	The other strategy, called the optimistic one, is to allow conflict happens and to deal with them when they occur. It looks like a dice game, and depending on the frequency, it could become hard to deal with conflicts.
	Those problems could be tackled with several technologies which enable one to work more naturally in collaboration.
	How to deal with large diagrams ? Thanks to EMF Mylyn bridge we are able to focus in the diagram on the information which matters, the information contextual to a change you have to do or that somebody else did.
	How keeping documentation and model synchronized ? Thanks to Mylyn Intent we could mix natural and formal language. This is some kind of literate programming adapted to modeling with one specificity : you can update the model, or the doc, it doesn't matter, the tool help you keeping them synchronized anyway
	How to support better models fragmentation ? Model tools could be behaving like the tools we are used to when programming. They should not  make the assumption that every referenced element will always be there. This is possible by playing nicely with the EMF proxy mechanism.
	Keeping models coherent with fragmentation could be ensured through platform logical models. That API enables components to trigger changes on any file operation.
	How to avoid models splitting ? CDO is an impressive technology which have been around in Eclipse for a few years now. It keeps getting better and provides, as a model repository, every service you might dream of. Using it, one is able to build a solution based on pessimistic locking at the model element level, with live updates when you are connected.
	If you are more interested by the optimistic strategy, CDO offers the possibility to provide conflict resolver, to solve conflicts in the more automatic way, when they happend. CDO does not enable only efficient collaborative strategies, it solves the scalabilty issue, by loading only necessary model elements and unloading them automatically.
	I would like to share with you what is happening on a broader scale. Those technologies are only a start in collaborative modeling, and there are many ways to get inspiration about collaboration, github or google docs for instance.

Of course a large part of this talk was reserved for demos of the improvements in Mylyn, EMF Compare, EGit, and Dawn, but I have currently no video of them to share.

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.

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 !

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 !

EclipseCon 09 - Week-end before and first day

We arrived with Cedric Friday night in Silicon Valley. Flight trip was an opportunity to try SWTBot and look at current GEF Support.

Saturday morning we decided to see the Googleplex. It was not as easy to find as we originally thought, I mean without looking on google maps or taking the address before :P

At least we found one of their office



as well as their own street



and their famous google cars



On the afternoon we went to San Francisco downtown to enjoy the city and do some shopping. Apple store was an occasion to admire their laptops and ask a seller some facts to convince our Boss that our productivity will increase with them :)

On Sunday we went to Berkeley university, where we met sociable squirrels !



First day of EclipseCon was a lot of fun. There seems to be less people than last year but people are still friendly and enthusiasts.

At morning I attended Ketan great SWTBot tutorial, which was successful as room was filled to the brim.

At the end of afternoon Acceleo "Best Open Source Eclipse-Based Developer Tool" award was the pleasantly surprise. Thanks for the community for this great recognition of our work at Obeo !