Acceleo 2

We have had a number of questions regarding the diagram comparison support in EMF Compare 2. This is something that was (somewhat) provided with EMF Compare 1.3, but that we have yet to port to the new version of the APIs.Well, the work is ongoing ... [More] and preliminary support for diagram comparison is available in the current integration builds. The port was done in the context of the modeling platform working group and is mainly targetting Papyrus, though ecoretools diagrams (and plain GMF diagrams) should also be supported.We have not fully settled down on how to represent deletions on a diagram, but this otherwise begins to take form :Do note that this is still very rough, and merging some of these differences (mainly "label changes") graphically is still problematic, but we expect this to be fine-tuned for Kepler's release :).Stay tuned! [Less]

After agile methods, devops, continuous integration, model driven development, ... here is coming the new awesome approach to improve quality and productivity: CHOCOLATE!Here are the slides of my talk at EclipseCon Europe 2012.I spoke about ... [More] gamification, pleasure-based management, packaging tooling, continuous quality improvement, ... with  a common thread based on "choco-commit".It was a challenge to use a fun way to explain so many different aspect of industrialization in software development.Thanks for all the feedback I received about it..prezi-player { width: 450px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; } Chocolate Driven Development on Prezi I hope several of these ideas can help you improve the pleasure of making good softwares or can be useful to discover some Eclipse plug-in to simplify packaging and agile development. [Less]

After agile methods, devops, continuous integration, model driven development, ... here is coming the new awesome approach to improve quality and productivity: CHOCOLATE!Here are the slides of my talk at EclipseCon Europe 2012.I spoke about ... [More] gamification, pleasure-based management, packaging tooling, continuous quality improvement, ... with  a common thread based on "choco-commit".It was a challenge to use a fun way to explain so many different aspect of industrialization in software development.Thanks for all the feedback I received about it..prezi-player { width: 450px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }Chocolate Driven Development on PreziI hope several of these ideas can help you improve the pleasure of making good softwares or can be useful to discover some Eclipse plug-in to simplify packaging and agile development. [Less]

Exactly one year ago, I published here the results of the measuring and enhancing of EMF Compare 1.3 scalability in which I detailed how we greatly improved the comparison times, and how we had observed that EMF Compare was a glutton in terms of ... [More] memory usage. At the time, we did isolate a number of improvement axes... And they were part of what made us go forward to a new major version, EMF Compare 2.0.Now that 2.0 is out of the oven, and that we are rid of the 1.* stream limitations, it was time to move on to the next step and make sure we could scale to millions! We continued the work started last year as part of the modeling platform working group on the support for logical resources in EMF Compare.The main problem was that EMF Compare needed to load two (or three, for comparisons with VCSs) times the whole logical model to compare. For large models, that quickly reached up to huge amount of required heap space. The idea was to be able to determine beforehand which of the fragments really needed to be loaded : if a model is composed of 1000 fragments, and only 3 out of this thousand have changed, it is a huge waste of time and memory to load the 997 others.To this end, we tried with EMF Compare 1.3 to make use of Eclipse Team's "logical model" APIs. This was promising (as shown in last year's post about our performances then), but limited since the good behavior of this API depends on the VCS providers to properly use them. In EMF Compare 2, we decided on circumventing this limitation by using our own implementation of a logical model support (see the wiki for more on that).As a quick explanation, an EMF model can be seen as a set of elements referencing each other. This is what we call a "logical model" :However, these elements are not always living in memory. When they are serialized on disk, they may be saved into a single physical file, or they can be split across multiple files, as long as the references between these files can be resolved : If we remain at the file level, this logical model can be seen as a set of 7 files :Now let's suppose that we are trying to compare a modified copy (left) of this model with a remote version (right). This requires a three-way comparison of left, right and their common ancestor, origin. That would mean loading all 21 files in memory in order to recompose the logical model. However, suppose that only some of these files really did change (blue-colored hereafter) :LeftRightIn such a case, what we need to load is actually a small part of the 21 total files. For each three sides of the comparison, we only need to load the ones that can potentially show differences :Which means that we only need to load 9 out of the 21 files, for 58% less memory than what EMF Compare 1 needed (if we consider all files to be of equal "weight"). Just imagine if the whole logical model was composed of a thousand fragments instead of 7, allowing us to load only 9 files out of the total 3000!With these enhancements, we decided to run the very same tests as what we did last year with EMF Compare 1.3. Please take a look at my old post for the three sample models' structure and the test modus operandi. I will only paste here as a reminder :The models' structure : Small Nominal Large Fragments 99 399 947 Size on disk (MB) 1.37 8.56 49.9 Packages 97 389 880 Classes 140 578 2,169 Primitive Types 581 5,370 17,152 Data Types 599 5,781 18,637 State Machines 55 209 1,311 States 202 765 10,156 Dependencies 235 2,522 8,681 Transitions 798 3,106 49,805 Operations 1,183 5,903 46,029 Total element count 3,890 24,623 154,820 And the Time and memory used required to compare each of the model sizes with EMF Compare 1.3 : Small Nominal Large Time (seconds) 6 22 125 maximum Heap (MB) 555 1,019 2,100 And without further ado, here is how these figures look like with EMF Compare 2.1 : Small Nominal Large Time (seconds) 5 13 48 maximum Heap (MB) 262 318 422 In short, EMF Compare now scales much more smoothly than it did with the 1.* stream, and it requires a lot less memory than it previously did. Furthermore, the one remaining time sink are the I/O and model parsing activities. The comparison in itself being reduced to only a few seconds.For those interested, you can find a much more detailed description of this work and the decomposition of the comparison process on the wiki. [Less]

On behalf of the team, I am very proud to announce that the 2.0 release of EMF Compare is now available and can be downloaded from its update site. This release is compatible with Eclipse 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8 and 4.2.This new version is an overhaul of ... [More] the project and as such contains too many enhancements to really list. You can refer to the project plan for an overview of the major themes adressed by this new release, or to my previous post for more information on why we decided to rewrite EMF Compare.API compatibility between the 1.3 and 2.0 releases is not assured. The new APIs provided with 2.0 were developed in order to be simpler and more intuitive. A migration guide is not yet available, but we will provide all possible help in order to bridge the gap between the two streams' APIs and help users migrate to the new and improved Compare.Do not hesitate to drop by on the forum for any question regarding this release! [Less]

Eclipse Juno has been released with plenty of new exciting features.Of course, the most famous new feature is about the platform which is now based on the Eclipse 4.X main stream.The New and  Noteworthy for Platform, JDT, PDE and Equinox explains all ... [More] these new facilities.For the Modeling project, the Annual Report resumes the main activities for this release:The increasing popularity of modeling and model-driven development continues to be an important driver for the growth of Eclipse. The modeling ecosystem is active and diverse with commiters from more than 30 different companies. New projects are created with regularity and are inherently integrated by virtue of their reuse of EMF's core APIs. In 2012, modeling extends its community by addressing the need of a broad range of domains. DSLs for programming languages using Xtext's extensible expression language are exploited by Xcore, a textual syntax for EMF's Ecore and by Xtend, an concise JVM-based language. Both support rich textual editors reminiscent of JDT's Java editor. A DSL for business modeling with GMF 3.0 and EEF 1.1 that supports the creation of custom graphical and forms-based editors. Support OMG standards, including Acceleo 3.3 for code generation, OCL 4.0 with more efficient API and tooling, and support for the UML 2.4 and BPMN 2 specifications. Massively scalable deployment with CDO for collaborative and distributed repositories as well as EGF to manage the assembly of software factories. With the launch of Juno, EMF will be in heart of Eclipse 4.2 SDK's workbench model. This is a great opportunity for end users to discover the various interesting modeling innovations.DOWNLOAD If you want to test Eclipse Modeling Juno, the Amalgamation project provides a bundle with the core Modeling plug-ins and a nice UI to discover Modeling tools hosted by Eclipse Foundation. [Less]

Eclipse Juno has been released with plenty of new exciting features.Of course, the most famous new feature is about the platform which is now based on the Eclipse 4.X main stream.The New and  Noteworthy for Platform, JDT, PDE and Equinox explains all ... [More] these new facilities.For the Modeling project, the Annual Report resumes the main activities for this release:The increasing popularity of modeling and model-driven development continues to be an important driver for the growth of Eclipse. The modeling ecosystem is active and diverse with commiters from more than 30 different companies. New projects are created with regularity and are inherently integrated by virtue of their reuse of EMF's core APIs.In 2012, modeling extends its community by addressing the need of a broad range of domains.DSLs for programming languages using Xtext's extensible expression language are exploited by Xcore, a textual syntax for EMF's Ecore and by Xtend, an concise JVM-based language. Both support rich textual editors reminiscent of JDT's Java editor. A DSL for business modeling with GMF 3.0 and EEF 1.1 that supports the creation of custom graphical and forms-based editors.Support OMG standards, including Acceleo 3.3 for code generation, OCL 4.0 with more efficient API and tooling, and support for the UML 2.4 and BPMN 2 specifications.Massively scalable deployment with CDO for collaborative and distributed repositories as well as EGF to manage the assembly of software factories.With the launch of Juno, EMF will be in heart of Eclipse 4.2 SDK's workbench model. This is a great opportunity for end users to discover the various interesting modeling innovations.DOWNLOAD If you want to test Eclipse Modeling Juno, the Amalgamation project provides a bundle with the core Modeling plug-ins and a nice UI to discover Modeling tools hosted by Eclipse Foundation. [Less]

If you are in Washington for EclipseCon 2012, don't miss the "hot new product showcase".It will start Wednesday, at 17:50.You will see plenty of demos of new exciting technologies created with Eclipse projects.Last year, I really enjoy it because: ... [More] it's very easy to speak with the guys who created these products,  you are not stress because of the beginning of a talk you can see products, while talks are main focus on technologies the vibes is good, as there is a reception at the same place This year, I'm proud to present there our DSL workbench: Obeo Designer.One of our challenge we would like to do with our visitors: create in live, with only several minutes, a nice looking graphical designer customized with the visitor's choices.To explain its features in a funny way, I made this original presentation:.prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; } [Less]

This year has been a really important one for us at Obeo to think about our current products and how to improve them. Eclipse Juno was a big investment for us, with a lot of modeling projects in the release train : Acceleo, EMF Compare, EEF, ATL ... [More] , Mylyn Intent...EMF Compare is the one that got us thinking the most, and we ended up developping two versions in parallel during the development phase of Juno. First is the version we actually included in the release train, 1.3.1, which is now the maintenance stream.This version includes a number of new developments and enhancements. Most notably, the detection and merging of differences on values ordering has been greatly improved, and the merging in general was one of our major endeavors this year, fixing thousands of corner cases. Please refer to the release highlights for the noteworthy changes of this version.However, the 6 years of development spent on EMF Compare allowed us to identify a number of limitations in the architecture and overall design of the project, most of which cannot be worked around or re-designed without breaking the core of the comparison engine. We needed a complete overhaul of the project, and thus the second version we've been developping through the past year is the 2.0.0.Version 2 has been started as part of the work sponsored in the context of the Modeling Platform Working Group. Its two main objectives are to :lift the architectural and technical limitations of EMF Compare so that we can reduce its memory footprint while improving its overall performance, andsimplify the API we offer to our adopters so that launching comparisons or exploiting the difference model can be done more effectively.We're also taking this opportunity to further our integration with the "standard" Eclipse Compare UI, making sure to use the Eclipse Compare UI everywhere we can. This means that the icon decorators will now properly show exactly as they would with text comparisons, the behavior when switching viewers on selection is now closer to what Eclipse Compare does...Version 2.0.0 of EMF Compare will be out in the first half of august. It focuses on the comparison of models presenting IDs of some sort (XMI ID, technical ID, ...). The design and architecture have both been remasterized with all the experience accumulated on the 1.* stream, greatly improving the user experience, performance, memory footprint and reusability of the tool. We've submitted a talk for Eclipse con Europe 2012 focussing on the intended improvements of this version. Do not hesitate to comment there if you're interested in it!Version 2.1.0 is scheduled shortly after that, sometime during september. That new version will leverage the new architecture to provide the scalability improvements mandatory for very large model comparisons. In short, EMF Compare will be able to function with time and memory footprints dependent on the number of actual differences instead of being dependent on the input models' size. [Less]

Picture by Alan CleaverIt's summer, the Juno release is over and you all deserve to rest and  enjoy your vacations... but hey, you might have missed it but the submission deadline for Eclipse Con europe is very close !Only 11 days before the early ... [More] birds deadline.others already submitted proposals, if you want to share your experience, demo the latests hot features of your project or if you have other cool stuff, go ahead and submit !FREE COUNTDOWN WIDGET [Less]