SysML Comparison and Contributions

Community and Ecosystem


The Juno release cycle has been very interesting for EMF Compare - as a project.

Discussions started through the  Modeling Platform working group lead to the sponsorship of a bunch of new features (we covered those before but in a nutshell :  UML dedicated support, UI enhancements, Graphical comparison support and Logical Model for EGit). 

Meanwhile we took a number of actions to make this project a more welcoming area for contributions and to ease adoption, some of these actions are technical (documentation, build, tests and continuous integration) and others are focused on community grow (transparency, communication, discussions with academic researchers).

We are not done yet and have several remaining actions but we can already see some results :

- new adopters appeared and contacted us through the bugzilla with use cases we had not envisionned, trying to keep the answering delay reasonable helped a lot in converging to a patch. Within Eclipse itself we've seen several new projects adopting the technology.
- new features contribution :  thanks to Arthur from Atos a dedicated support for SysML model just got integrated and is now built. In those cases where timeframe is obviously bigger than a simple patch, git helps a lot.
- discussions with academics helped us drafting powerful new features for 2.0 like fingerprints based matching (a complete blog post about this will come soon)

EclipseCon US will be a great place to share our experience, I if you're interested or would like to see a specific topic within this scope, feel free to add a comment.

More about SysML ...

The SysML contribution is built on top of the UML dedicated support, it just got integrated and built.
It never got released so it might be a bit rough, and we still have some issues we want to fix for 1.3 but if you feel adventurous, go get the bits here !(update site)

SysML Comparison and Contributions was originally published by Cédric Brun at CTO @ Obeo on December 01, 2011.