We've recently had a good number of people asking for comparisons between Acceleo 2 and its new major version Acceleo 3. Some people also wondered how Acceleo ranked compared to the other trendy code generation tool, Xpand. The three have the same goal : generating text from models, let's take a closer look at their respective performances.With the migration capabilities we have between Acceleo 2 and Acceleo 3, comparing those two has proven rather easy; comparing them with Xpand has been a little more trouble for me as I am not familiar to this tool. I still attained a result I believe to be interesting.I didn't make in-depth comparisons between the tooling of each of these three tools, focusing on the generation performance only. GUI comparison may come later, when I have the courage :).What I did compare was the generation performance for a given set of generation templates that I ported to all three of the technologies. The result is that all three tools (Acceleo 2, Acceleo 3 and X...

MoDisco 0.9M4 has been released this week with Eclipse Indigo M4.One of the new interesting features is the traceability between an EMF model created from the reverse-engineering of a Java application and the corresponding source code.It allows to directly navigate from elements of the Java model in the MoDisco Model Browser to the corresponding code fragment in a Java editor.This feature is provided by a new Java discoverer which can be executed with the MoDisco menu "Discover Java and Inventory model from Java source code" available on a Java project.This discoverer automatically creates three EMF models:a Java model describing the content of the source code: it is the model created by the basic Java discoverer.a KDM Inventory model describing the structure of the Java project (all the files and folders).a traceability model containing relations between the Java model elements and source code fragmentsIf you need to know more about these models, you can read the documentation&nb...

In this sequence of posts, I explain how to use the Model Browser provided by MoDisco to inspect an EMF model.In the first three posts, I have described how to directly access to instances of a given type, how to navigate through the model elements and how to customize the browser.In this last post, I will now describe how to create and execute queries on model elements directly from the browser.The features presented in the previous posts, allow you to navigate through the elements of your model by traversing the links. You can also highlight some characteristics of specific elements by defining a customization which dynamically change their rendering (icon, label, font, color, etc).But in some situations, you would like to calculate values from model elements. These values could be of basic types (numbers or strings) or could be other model elements.MoDisco provides a mechanism to execute queries interactively on model elements selected in the Model Browser. First, I will explain how...

I was recently asked to translate into english  the case-study presented by BritAir during MD Day 2010. So, here is a summary.BritAir, a french airline company, is a subsidiary of Air France which transported about 3,5 millions of passengers last year.Another activity of BritAir is the training of pilots, commercial staff and maintenance technicians of other companies.Despite BritAir has no developer, the company wanted to keep the control and the quality of its applications:Normalize the user interface of the applicationsNormalize the way the applications are designedImprove the development productivityDocument the applicationsTo achive these goals, Olivier Corbel, the IS Manager, decided to put in place a new development process based on a Model-Driven approach. This project was conducted with Mia-Software and Sodifrance.The principle of the BritAir approach is based on two main ideas:A model describing the business data (entities, identifiers, attributes, child/parent...

Like every year, the french modeling community has met during the MD Day last week in Paris.It was the fourth edition, with a format which makes the success of this event: each partner (11 this year) must come with one of its customers who presents a real-life project where model-driven engineering has been used. Once again, despite optimistic forecasts, we still ran out of place, and we have been forced to close the registrations three weeks before the event ! Finally there have been 275 attendees (234 last year).This year, the conference started with Steve Cook's keynote "UML: Past, Present and Future". Stevecook uml mdday2010I already knew the past: I've worked a while with Booch notation in the 90' (remember these little clouds...) ;-) What I found really interesting was the part about the UML dilemnas:What is the real value proposition of UML ? There is often a misandurstanding about why to create UML models.Should DSLs be based on UML ? UML should be more reusable....