Acceleo - Eclipse

Hi followers,It is time to give some news about EEF for eclipse indigo.We have changed our build system since the build server at eclipse suddenly dies, so we are using buckminster for EEF 0.9 stream.For those who want to test the M3 release, we just ... [More] committed our contribution to the release train, so you can find all the necessary informations in the installation section of EEF :http://wiki.eclipse.org/EEF_Installation_GuideEEF should be available in the next days in the modeling packages, too. For EEF itself, we are making some major changes in the runtime to improve performances and generate less code. [Less]

ESE is already over, and from this edition I would like to retain 3 things :Community is open and diverse Photo from CliffEclipse is a community, and ESE is an awesome opportunity to meet in real life members of Eclipse community. I have found that ... [More] 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 everywhereIt 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 eyes 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 forwardPhoto from jolien_vallinsIn 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 ! [Less]

Juste un mot pour vous dire que les vidéos du JUG Summer Camp 2010 sont disponibles sur Parleys ici : http://www.parleys.com/#id=31362&st=4 La mienne intitulée "Le MDA en 2010, une visiion pragmatique!" est ici :

Juste un mot pour vous dire que les vidéos du JUG Summer Camp 2010 sont disponibles sur Parleys ici : http://www.parleys.com/#id=31362&st=4 La mienne intitulée "Le MDA en 2010, une visiion pragmatique!" est ici :

Here are my slides I presented at the 2nd Biannual Symposium on Eclipse Open SourceSoftware & OMG Open Specifications in Minneapolis.I spoke about our experiences with Acceleo to implement the MOF-to-Text Language specification. At the end of my ... [More] talk, I explain problems we had about sharing our feedback about specs with the OMG organisation. OMG guys was very interested about this and I hope it will simplify some collaboration beetween Eclipse community and OMG spec writers.Here is the abstract:"When OMG tackled the standardization of an M2T syntax with the MOF Model to Text Language specification, commiters decided to rewrite Acceleo from scratch as an official Eclipse Foundation project, changing the syntax to the OMG standard while keeping the exemplary tooling and pragmatism of Acceleo.org. With Acceleo 3.0 included in Eclipse 3.6, our new goal is to provide the de facto or reference implementation of the standard; however, some parts of the specification are still quite vague and ambiguous and collaboration with OMG isn't smooth. We discuss both the specification and the implementation, and gather overall thoughts on how to provide a long-term and successful communication channel between the Acceleo project and OMG representatives."Here are the slides: 2010 06 22 omg - obeo [Less]

Here are my slides I presented at the 2nd Biannual Symposium on Eclipse Open SourceSoftware & OMG Open Specifications in Minneapolis.I spoke about our experiences with Acceleo to implement the MOF-to-Text Language specification. At the end of my ... [More] talk, I explain problems we had about sharing our feedback about specs with the OMG organisation. OMG guys was very interested about this and I hope it will simplify some collaboration beetween Eclipse community and OMG spec writers.Here is the abstract:"When OMG tackled the standardization of an M2T syntax with the MOF Model to Text Language specification, commiters decided to rewrite Acceleo from scratch as an official Eclipse Foundation project, changing the syntax to the OMG standard while keeping the exemplary tooling and pragmatism of Acceleo.org. With Acceleo 3.0 included in Eclipse 3.6, our new goal is to provide the de facto or reference implementation of the standard; however, some parts of the specification are still quite vague and ambiguous and collaboration with OMG isn't smooth. We discuss both the specification and the implementation, and gather overall thoughts on how to provide a long-term and successful communication channel between the Acceleo project and OMG representatives."Here are the slides:2010 06 22 omg - obeo [Less]

Several months ago, at Eclipse Con 2010, I presented a talk titled "Acceleo Code Generation : Let's start with an Android example". This is the demo.At Eclipse Summit Europe, we will do the talk again. This time, I won't participate... But, Mikael ... [More] Barbero and Stephane Begaudeau will show an advanced version of this tutorial : "Creating a Language for Android Apps with Eclipse Modeling". Both are software engineers at Obeo. They have worked on this 4 hours tutorial with Jan Koehnlein and Holger Schill from Itemis.In this tutorial, attendees will create working Android applications using Eclipse modeling techniques. This talk will start with a short presentation of Android and its development tools. Then the attendees will learn how to define abstractions using EMF Ecore and how to create a language and an editor for these with Xtext. Finally, they will implement a generator that creates the Java and XML source code of the Android application with the help of Acceleo. The team will demonstrate how these ingredients are integrated into the Eclipse workbench just like Java and XML do.Thank you guys for the good job you have done to prepare this tutorial. That kicks ass! The result seems to be very impressive...This tutorial will also be interesting for beginners... Being an expert at code generation or Acceleo is not necessary to get started on your first code generator : using the Acceleo editor and the powerful features it exposes (completion, syntax highlighting, on-the-fly compilation, quick outline, ...), it is very easy to get started once you understand the most basic principles. Flickr/androids eat apples!/laihiu Goulwen Le Fur will also be at Eclipse Summit Europe 2010 and he will talk about EEF, this very usefull component I have talked about several times this year. [Less]

Several months ago, at Eclipse Con 2010, I presented a talk titled "Acceleo Code Generation : Let's start with an Android example". This is the demo.At Eclipse Summit Europe, we will do the talk again. This time, I won't participate... But, Mikael ... [More] Barbero and Stephane Begaudeau will show an advanced version of this tutorial : "Creating a Language for Android Apps with Eclipse Modeling". Both are software engineers at Obeo. They have worked on this 4 hours tutorial with Jan Koehnlein and Holger Schill from Itemis.In this tutorial, attendees will create working Android applications using Eclipse modeling techniques. This talk will start with a short presentation of Android and its development tools. Then the attendees will learn how to define abstractions using EMF Ecore and how to create a language and an editor for these with Xtext. Finally, they will implement a generator that creates the Java and XML source code of the Android application with the help of Acceleo. The team will demonstrate how these ingredients are integrated into the Eclipse workbench just like Java and XML do.Thank you guys for the good job you have done to prepare this tutorial. That kicks ass! The result seems to be very impressive...This tutorial will also be interesting for beginners... Being an expert at code generation or Acceleo is not necessary to get started on your first code generator : using the Acceleo editor and the powerful features it exposes (completion, syntax highlighting, on-the-fly compilation, quick outline, ...), it is very easy to get started once you understand the most basic principles. Flickr/androids eat apples!/laihiu Goulwen Le Fur will also be at Eclipse Summit Europe 2010 and he will talk about EEF, this very usefull component I have talked about several times this year. [Less]

The Open World Forum took place in Paris on September 30 and October 1. This was a great opportunity to discover open source tools and technologies, as well as getting to know great people of this field. The 2010 edition has attracted over 1500 ... [More] participants from 40 countries!Obeo was present and demonstrated the use of Acceleo 3 to generate android applications, this demo earned us the Demo Cup 2010 award! This award is given to recognize the most innovative and game-changer open source solution in its marketplace.Acceleo, selected from 13 top nominees, received one of five prestigious trophies at the closing ceremony of the Open World Forum, awarded by a jury consisting of leading international experts in the open source world. After the Eclipse Community Award in 2009, this prize recognizes the constant efforts of the Acceleo team & community to provide a powerful tool of the highest quality. [Less]

Maybe twitter gives a false impression that you're keeping the users informed of what is going on. False because 140 chars can't be enough !Many things are keeping the Obeo guys busy, from the Eclipse and open-source involvement to the incubation of ... [More] highly innovative products you'll love while still providing the best service to our customers looking for expertise :) .Oh, and we provided the first Helios service release for Compare, Acceleo, EEF, ATL and much more, go get the modeling package !Summer is an internship time in France, and for us every internship's ultimate goal is to hire another great person. I can say we did succeed this year ! Expect even more great contributions, user experience polishing and features for Indigo !!Furthermore the newcomers completely understood the chocolate-commit spirit ...No doubt you'll hear about those guys at some point, Stéphane already started to blog...Speaking about Indigo, we wrote down a "long term roadmap" for EMF Compare on the wiki, feel free to have a look ! Coming soon : more information about the MPatch contribution recently integrated in EMF Compare.Ok, enough teasing, back to code generation. In case you did not noticed Acceleo 3 provides one of the most compelling editing tooling you can get with the Eclipse platform. Using the JDT I often find myself thinking "oh, they did though about this ! great !" : you'll often get the same feeling with Acceleo 3...Let's try with an example: it's often useful to be able to call Java logic directly from a template. If you want to do so, start by writting down this java logic.Then call it from your template, obviously it's not going to work as is. Here we're calling the "getJavaCompatibleName" method on an EClass, but this method is not existing on this type. Acceleo provides a mechanism to call Java logic associated with a given meta-class: the first parameter of the method have to be of the type of the extended meta-class and Acceleo will automatically transform a myInstance.myMethod() call to a SomeClass.myMethod(myInstance).If you want to try that, call the quickfix menu on the compilation error with CTRL+1 :Choosing the "Create Java Service Wrapper" quick fix will add a new query to your template :And your done ! [Less]