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 !

Obeo new modeling box is coming

At Obeo we are currently working hard for the finishing of the next version of our eclipse based modeling studio named Obeo Designer.


Obeo Designer 5.0 embeds our latest modeling technologies.

• Acceleo 3.0.2
  

Acceleo is a text generation tool. If you think that code generation sucks due to its lack of tooling, then you should probably try Acceleo. Its offers much more than a complete eclipse editor with syntactic coloration, code completion and quick fixes. For instance it provides an integrated debugger :

Acceleo debugger

Acceleo is a technology that has been recognized as innovative and effective.

• Obeo Traceability 2.0
  

Obeo Traceability is a tool to manage the synchronization between your models and the generated text. For each model element, you are able to know which text section have been generated and navigate between text and model. If you decide to modify the generated text, Obeo Traceability will automatically indicates it, and offers you the choice mark the section as not generated or to update model and generator.

Before modification on the left and after on the right

Obeo Traceability provide these features with a user interface completely integrated to Eclipse.

• Viewpoint 5.2
  

Viewpoint allows one to create easily graphical editors. Easily ? For each editor you simply define mappings between model elements and graphical styles along with tools which describe modifications to make on model in response to user actions. Graphical editors ? you could specify diagrams, tables and trees and the API allows you to define your own kind of editors.
See example editors below made with Viewpoint.

Diagram editor

Table editor

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 !

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Resize matters !

A spam like title because recently I worked was on resize stuffs :

• On GEF Bot there was a painful bug . If the edit part was resizable, a drag behaves like a resize. Now drag behaves correctly and a new resize method is available to resize an edit part :
  
  
  
  
• Do you find useful the ability to drag the selector figure in the outline of GMF Editors ? you will probably like the ability the resize this figure (fullscreen video) :
  
  I will try to contribute this feature for 3.7
  

GSoC 2010

Now that Google announced that they will sponsor this year again students to work on some cool open-source projects, I hope Eclipse foundation will be candidate again.

Mentoring organizations should candidate before March 12, but we could start now to collect ideas, they could be contributed on the wiki. GSoC is an incredible opportunity for eclipse community to see enhancements or new features added to your favorite projects, do not miss it !

If you are a student and don't know how to get involved, have a look to our new contribute page.

you will find more info on the GSoC 2010 flyer and important date on the timeline.

Sketch capabilities for your GEF based editor

As everyone, I suppose you have seen iPad videos, at least you heard about it :

iPad from stadycam on Vimeo.

I suppose you have complained about its closed platform, its single-task os, or may be its tendentious commercial name. However with such a device (a tablet), you think your GEF based editor could benefit from sketch capabilities ? Indeed that something Ugo Sangiorgi did :

OmniModeling on MoLIC Editor from Ugo Sangiorgi on Vimeo.

The good news is that it will probably be contributed to Eclipse.org. If you are interested, have a look to this new project proposal.