EclipseCon Europe Day 2

During this second day of the EclipseCon Europe, several great talks were given, I won’t describe all of them but I’ll talk about some innovations from the modeling community that were presented yesterday.

The collaborative modeling talk highlighted several concerns that need to be handled by the modeling community to build a modern modeling development environment.

As such, we’ve seen some of the new features available in EMF compare and EGit to keep the consistency of models linked one to the other during commits. We also had a demonstration of the upcoming graphical comparison.

Among the many impressive technologies coming soon in Eclipse, the demonstration of the modeling integration with Mylyn was truly impressive. For those who didn’t see it previously, Mylyn’s context based workflow can now integrate Eclipse Modeling diagrams making elements disappear if they are not used for the current task. It will bring a new breath of fresh air to the graphical modeling in Eclipse.

We’ve also seen how the modeling community is getting ready for collaborative modeling with a presentation of the collaborative graphical editor of Dawn. Those initiatives will give end users the ability to edit the same diagrams in real time just like in Google Doc.

In the afternoon, Alexander has presented a great Xtext integration in GMF, GEF and JFace. It allows GMF diagrams to embed the Xtext tooling and while I believe that the Xtext tooling in a GMF editor is a bit overkill to handle the expressions visible in a diagram, the equally technically impressive JFace integration is definitely on my wish list for a future release of EEF as this level of tooling is definitely needed to edit expressions in a view.

One of most awaited talk for the modeling community was of course the official presentation of Xcore and it didn’t disappointed. We had the opportunity to catch a few glimpse of Xcore before but this presentation has demonstrated how a textual based approach to define the metamodel could help the modeling community move forward by not only defining metamodels as just data structure schemas but as real skeletons that define the structure and its behavior.

As an example, we currently can define in Ecore derived attribute that are computed from other attribute but we can’t define how those derived attributes are working in the metamodel, we have to change the generated code for that but with Xcore you can define the metamodel and embed the algorithm used to compute the value of this attribute thanks to a textual approach. For those who want to have a closer look at Xcore, you can grab it on Ed’s Github account.

Finally, I really liked Frederic’s presentation of an eclipse modeling based studio for safety engineering. With a 20 min long demonstration, we could see an end user environment built on Eclipse that displayed a very efficient graphical editor that hides all the complexity to the end users while bringing them all the power of EMF.