Yet Another Modeling Blog ...

Why not generating EMF code with Acceleo ?

2011-11-03T03:18:00.000-07:00

Obeo has developed the Rolls Royce of the code generation. It's time to use this for the EMF generation tooling.

Since one year we are developping an alternative EMF generation with EEF. Now we have covered most of the EMF generation (even the model part!) and you can try it with the last EEF nighlty!

Here is the demonstration Stéphane made of the new wonderful feature:

For the ESE attenders, I will made a demo @ the modeling symposium this evening !

EEF submissions for EclipseCon Europe

2011-08-22T02:22:00.000-07:00

This year, I will try to present two talks to EclipseCon Europe about the Extended Editing Framework (EEF) and more generally Eclipse Modeling : Scientific application redesign in oil industry with Eclipse Modeling and 25 min to take care of your end users with EEF!.

Scientific application redesign in oil industry with Eclipse Modeling

This first talk deals with a work we made with IFP energies nouvelles (IFPEN) for redesign a part of its platform OpenFlow. IFPEN develops and provides a platform aiming at creating scientific softwares for oil production industry. This platform offers several services like tools helping creation of graphical user interfaces or a communication framework to send data to supercomputers.

The communication part of the suite is fully operational but can be really improved, mainly in the way the communications are described. The work with IFPEN was to create a communication designer with EcoreTools and to generate all the communication layer of the IFPEN platform with Acceleo 3.

For this talk, I will be assisted by two persons of IFPEN and we will show you :

The different elements of Eclipse Modeling we used to made this redesign
A demonstration of the final Communication Designer
And a demonstration of a second tool we made to create automatically GUI with EEF

25 min to take care of your end users with EEF!

The second talk I proposed is more EEF-centric. EEF has reached its version 1.0 and is no longer in incubation. The two years in incubation allowed the framework to be more and more robust and to be a real candidate to become the EMF.edit framework version 2.0!

I will try to focus this talk on a tutorial aspect to enable people attending the presentation to use EEF immediatly on their own use cases.
The talk will start with a short introduction of the project and will be followed by a first tutorial to get good looking properties view for a given metamodel defined with Ecore.
After a short presentation of the different kinds of generable GUI with EEF, a second tutorial will show how to create very usable form editors with the extension part of EEF.

I hope this description of the talks I've submitted around EEF convinced you and make you want to come to this wonderful event that is Europe EclipseCon !

EEF 1.0 : End of incubation !

2011-06-16T04:09:00.001-07:00

Shortly after the 0.9 release, the Extended Editing Framework come in 1.0 version. This is the end of the incubation time for the project !

Between these two releases, we mainly worked on the EMF generation with Acceleo. You will now be able to test it in the 1.0 version.

If you have "EEF EMF Code generation" installed, on a right click on the genmodel, a new "EEF" menu is available. Two actions allow you to generate Edit and Editor code.

This is a first experimental version. Do not hesitate to try it and to report us any problem on this new module.

EEF 0.9.0 Release

2011-05-03T03:01:00.000-07:00

Finally we did it !

After 5 Release Candidates, we finally released EEF 0.9 (a.k.a. Extended Editing Framework ;))! You can now download it on the EEF release update site!

What can you expect for this version:

Generate editors with EEF: EEF provides a new model (which is actually an extension of the existing EEF models) enabling you to model editor pages to generate sexy Forms Editors.
A cool new widget: EEF RichText - Based on the RichText widget of the EPF project, you can now edit your text properties (like documentation) in a Rich mode!
Finally an important step is a real better compatibility with EMF.edit framework. Modify your item providers and you'll find your very own features in the EEF views!

Now don't hesitate: Download it! Try it! Enjoy it! And give us your feedback to make EMF models editing really sexy!

EEF 0.9 New cool feature part I : EEF Editors

2011-01-28T01:43:00.000-08:00

Some weeks without any post on this blog because we done many changes on EEF to prepare an 0.9 version.

Probably the most exciting new feature is the ability to generate EEF editors with one click from the EcoreTools modeler. This demonstration shows how it's easy to produce EEF editors with this new version :

Next time, I will show you all the EEF editors features ...

edit: Etienne added the sound part of this demo ! ;)

My Challenge for ESE 2010 : Result

2010-11-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

Eclipse Summit Europe 2010 is nearly done and it's time to show the result of a challenge I started during this event : Setting sexy properties on the Ecore Sample Editor.

Here is a first screenshot of my works :

I plan to release it very quickly ...

Ready for ESE 2010

2010-10-31T08:14:00.000-07:00

I was very busy theses last week, but now It's ok, I'm ready for ESE 2010. What a another new exciting experience ! Thanks a lot to the program committee to have validated my talk EEF, present, past and future.

I do my presentation Wednesday at 16h in Silchersaal. My slides are already on slideshare

I hope we can meet during the summit and discuss about sexy properties ;)

Eclipse Wordlcup : Bye Bye France, Hello source code !

2010-06-18T05:31:00.000-07:00

Very sad day for french people, French team is probably out of the competition, thanks to Nicolas, Sidney and ... of course Raymond. Anyway, Here is the current rating in the Eclipse community :

Came from the end of ranking ldelaigue lead now the game. lredor is second, arichard third and Jens fourth. Finally fmaillet is always in top 5.

Sorry for Jonathan and Cédric who are now ranked 8th and 10th of the game. More information on : Forecast ranking.

I've just added the source code of the Eclipse Worldcup Forecast application on the Eclipse CVS. You can find it in the test directory of the eef project. Here is a PSF file.

Feel free to create you're own extension for the Eclipse WorldcupForecast Application ;)

Eclipse Worldcup : First results

2010-06-14T00:45:00.000-07:00

3 days of world cup, we can do a first check of the game results :

lredor and Cedric lead the game with 18 points. After, there is SMonnier, Jonathan and fmaillet with 17 points. Well played !

It's not too late to start playing if you want to join us in the game. To play, just download the application :

windows windows64 linux linux64 macosx macosx64

And add a new player. You're 18 points late but it remains 224 points to win !!

To finish, let me remind you the process to validate your forecasts :

Fill out your forecast in the application
Save the modification
Then use the menu "World Cup Forecasts > Commit" to send your datas

If you not save before commit or you not commit, the default score (0-0) we be validate and use to compute your score !

Let's play !

Share the Worldcup experience with the Eclipse Community !

2010-06-10T02:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Eclipse community, we want you!

The World cup 2010 starts tomorrow and as most of the french companies (and maybe worldwide) it's time for us to use our internal forecast game to see who will be the best soccer expert!
Most of the companies use an excel sheet to do it and others more "organised" developped a dedicated web service.

But as Obeo guys are Eclipse lovers, this year we created a new RCP application for this world cup event based on several Eclipse modeling components!!! This is an EEF sample application made in three days so it's not perfect yet !

Other people could say that it will be a good and cheap way to test our products (EEF and Acceleo) ... yeah yeah but we did it also for fun. So, you soccer lovers join us! We are looking for more beta testers so the whole Eclipse community is invited to use it and of course to have fun with this experience.

Want to play with us? Want to support your favourite team? The RCP application are available here :

windows windows64 linux linux64 macosx macosx64

How to use it? A short tutorial is on the wiki.

One main rule:
- Your forecast for the 'game of the day' should be committed at 06:00AM (UTC) (link timeanddate).

Exceptionally tomorrow (june 11th), you can play until the beginning of the first match !

For more information, you can consult the Game FAQ.

A few words to conclude:

- It's free, no registration and easy to use (only 3 menus to create and commit your forecasts)

- If you find a bug don't hesitate to report it, this game was built in 3 days thanks to EEF, Acceleo and others modeling components. Don't forget your are also a beta-tester!
- The application will evolve during the world cup by using other modeling tools. Feel free to make an extension and contribute it!
- Source code will be accessible very shortly.

I hope you will enjoy it and let's get the game started!

Go! go France!

Helios M6 - Acceleo/EEF back together

2010-03-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

Finally Helios M6 is here !

You can install Acceleo and EEF from the Helios Update Site and benefit of the last features of this two projects.

For the EEF one, there is some bug fixes but mainly there is a new option in the EEFGen model that let you choose if you want use JMerge to manage user code or not. There is two way to customize generated code by EEF :

Adding custom code in the dedicated area, protected area.
Subclassing the generated code, putting user code in theses and providing them with appropriated provider

Now for the first way you can use JMerge instead of Acceleo protected area. If you check the option "Use JMerge to manage user code" in the EEFGen model, Acceleo will not generated protected area anymore but put a @generated tag at the beginning of the classes and at the beginning of each method (thanks Ed for the feature request).

Ready for eCon 2010 !

2010-03-18T08:36:00.000-07:00

I'm ready for my first Eclipse Con 2010 ! It's very exciting to think that in some hours I'll be in Santa Clara to present EEF. My talk is a little shorter than in Eclipse Summit Europe so I focused on the essential.

My talk is monday at 14:42 and will deal with :

What is EEF ?
EEF in a Nutshell
Some advanced uses of EEF
EEF test case generation

There many topics in 12min but we are in Santa Clara during all Eclipse Con so feel free to ask us more information.

I have a second talk about SWTBot during Eclipse Con Thursday at 14:30. I'll present the work we done to create a bot (SWTBot) able to test GEF graphical modelers.

In this presentation I will talk about :

SWTBot, a brief description
GEF, what kind of application can be done with this framework?
SWTBot the GEF-dedicated API

SWTBot really help us to create more robust GEF and GMF applications.

See you in Santa Clara

Take 5 min to improve the properties view of EMF Library sample

2010-02-08T02:48:00.001-08:00

Recently, we received some bug about EEF for the library sample of EMF. After some fixes, EEF works for this metamodel. So I took 5 minutes (yes 5 minutes ! ;)) to make a demo about this sample.

The important thing behind this demo is the entire EEF process. You have all the steps needed to use EEF in the EMF generated treeviewer. Enjoy ;)

End of an exciting 2009 EEF year, let's go for 2010

2010-01-13T02:10:00.000-08:00

Yet another year that has passed very quickly. And what an exciting year. EEF became an Eclipse project and we have stabilized this component to allow most of EMF project to use it !

We're currently finishing our integration into Athena, and we're adding some new cool features like a better EMF Validation integration ... You can follow our development with the EEF's New and Noteworthy page !

Finally, I'd worked on the 2010 EEF roadmap and we plan to finish the automated tests generation, a EMF Databinding integration and some others cool stuff !

Finally, here is a teaser of what you can expect of EEF : EEF in RCP application

Thank you Satan (c)L. ferré

2010-01-11T04:19:00.000-08:00

"Pour les idées que tu maquilles / Dans la tête des citoyens". Il faut quand même avoir un grand sens de l'humour pour apprendre que nous avons _juste_ 78 millions de doses de vaccins contre le grippe A en trop sur les 90 millions qui avaient été commandés à l'origine. Avec un peu de chance, l'état va arriver à annuler de façon plus que douteuse la moitié de la commande ce qui selon mes calcul ne fera plus que 28 millions de doses à brader.

Que faire de ces doses ? Ça risque de ne pas être aussi simple à brader que les invendus de la saison précédente aux soldes. Certes c'est moche, certes personne n'en a voulu mais au moins ça peut servir. Nous voila avec des hangars entiers de vaccin contre un mal qui est deja passé et qui ne reviendra (ou au pire sous une forme mutée qui rendra le vaccin actuel inutilisable).

Un échange interessant de 1 vaccin contre la grippe A contre 1 vaccin contre la stupidité pour être envisagé. Les membres de notre gouvernement ne sont pas 28 millions mais il est sûr que vu l'état très avancé de certains specimen, il faudra une bonne quantité de vaccin avant d'espérer un début de remition.

Il est triste de constater que nos dirigeants ont une capacité à anticiper de quelques secondes. Quel manque de dicernement de la part des gens qui sont sensés faire tourner le monde !

J'avoue craindre que d'ici quelques mois, ce soit le dernier groupe facebook à la mode qui initie les prochains projets de loi. Il est probable que nous n'ayons jamais été dirigés par un gouvernement aussi "fashion victime". Une truite à les yeux rouge dans un bassin d'élevage à l'autre bout du monde ? Les médias rapportent ce fait plus qu'inquiétant en boucle jours après jours ? Passons une commande préventive de 157 millions de doses de vaccins contre la conjonctivite de la truite au cas où ce fléau serait transmissible à l'homme !!

Je ne suis pas d'une nature très politisée (plus par dépît que par desintérêt) mais il y a des fois j'avoue que le contexte donne envie de sortir de la torpeur pour souligner quelques faits qui me paraissent ... aberrants ...

Back from ESE 2009

2009-11-03T00:27:00.000-08:00

After a little break, I'm back ! :)

ESE 2009 was a very cool experience. An opportunity to meet very important people for the EEF project and to assist to very interesting presentations.

First of all, EMF, CDO, EMF Databinding tutorial was very interesting. It's a shame that we hadn't the time to do all the exercices.
In the afternoon the modeling symposium showed us some very interesting application of EMF. I found the demo of Cedric Vidal from ProxiAD especially interesting with the EMF customizer. This tools allows users to "customize" generated EMF models with a models using an Xtext syntax very close to CSS.

And that was all for the first day. A very nice diner in a typical German Restaurant and it was time to sleep a little.

The second day, after a first key note that let me quite unconvinced, it was time for talks. I assisted to many talks about e4 and the riena project then back to modeling talks. I went to the talk about the brigde between EMF and Oslo made by the AtlanMod/INRIA team. Finally, It was the talk of Cedric for Acceleo. What an amazing room ! Cedric made a very good talk and I was glad to see the audience impressed by the new Acceleo tooling.

The final day began with an interesting talk about Papyrus and the very very huge plan for the future. I saw that papyrus is on a good way and I'm happy they use EEF for this project. Final preparations and it was time for my talk. I'm quite satisfied of it. I had some good advice of people that assisted to my "sexy" talk. I finally went to the talk of Mariot about SWTBot, what an amazing technology ! EEF have a start of support for automated tests with SWTBot and I really think that finalize this part of EEF is one of the important job of EEF in 2009.

ESE is finished and now we have to improve EEF to come next year with very new powerful features !

Ready for Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 !

2009-10-26T06:08:00.001-07:00

It's time to finalize my trip to ludwigsburg ! My presentation is ready (most impatient can read it here), it remains for me to prepare my speech for Thursday.

I'm also eager to attend to the talks of ESE : EMF Databinding soon be a important component for EEF for example.

See you in Germany for those who will come to Eclipse Summit!

Some news about EEF project

2009-09-13T03:42:00.001-07:00

First of all, Hello Eclipse world !

I'm proud to be included in Eclipse Planet and to join the Eclipse community. And to celebrate this, here is some news of the EEF project :)

All the EEF team has worked on adding new features and stabilizing the project. We have now an framework more simple and more extensible. For instance, all the architecture of the Acceleo generation module has been redesigned to ease the extension of the generation when we add new widgets.
This work has been done to create a new widget for EEF, the "flat reference table" which is a "slim version" of the reference table.

The "AdvancedReferenceTable"

The "FlatReferenceTable"

A second big part of our work was focused on the generation of tests for EEF. And we start to have nice results :) Now, it's possible to generate JUnit test cases, using the SWTBot project, that test the result of the EEF generation for a given project. A test is generated for each modelized widget. We are currently able to test Text and Checkbox. Now we have to extend this generation for all the EEF widgets !

But it's not all ! We not only work on the technical aspects of the project. We finally have our web page in the EMFT project website. And with this page, we started to work on the wiki for EEF.

The last part of the work was to integrate EEF into Athena Common Build. We have not finished yet, but we hope to achieve this very soon.

Eclipse Acceleo Day - Acceleo by the team ...

2009-07-15T03:21:00.000-07:00

After a quick meal at the restaurant of the university and many discuss about Acceleo, it was time to start the second set of talks for this Acceleo Day.

The presentations in the afternoon were mostly dedicated to describe the work of the Acceleo team. However, the first talk was a feed back of Cedric Vidal from ProxiAD that showed how he coupled Acceleo and development of dedicated tooling to really improve the JEE development and in the same time keep simplicity in the generation modules. The simplicity of the module was garantee by adding the good part of data in the model. In the same time, the editing tools for the model muse be appropriated to keep the model creation easy for the users.

After the presentation of Cedric came François Gaudin from Makina Corpus which introduce the work he make for WISSS, the module that he lead in the Acceleo Module Farm. His talk describe the need and the goal of its module and he gave his point of view on the distribution of the informations between the generation module and the models.

This presentations finished, we made the second coffee break of the day.

The last part of the day was dedicated to the new version of Acceleo that we call Eclipse Acceleo. This version is the future of Acceleo so we had to introduce it during this day.
First, Cédric Brun (from Obeo) came to present the Eclipse Acceleo project, the history, the need and the goals. A description of the MTL standard and a point on the status of the project currently was made during this talk.

The last talk of the day was mine about the use of Eclipse Acceleo for the EEF project. But this, is another story that I will tell you in another post.

After my talk, Etienne gathered the people that made a presentation plus some people of the Acceleo Team. We made a general discussion about Acceleo and try to reply to question that are ofter made to the Acceleo team.

This discussion finished the First Eclipse Acceleo Day. This day was very interesting and exciting, the feedback of the community was very awesome and will hope that this event can be make the next year.

Thanks to all for this day, especially the main organizer of this event Freddy ...

;)

Eclipse Acceleo Day - Acceleo by the users ...

2009-07-13T07:25:00.000-07:00

The "Libre" Software Meeting (LSM/RMLL) took place last week in Nantes. The Wednesday, It was possible to assist to the first Eclipse Acceleo Day during this event.

For the first time, most of the Acceleo users where gathered to discuss about their experience and what do they expect for the next versions.

The morning was dedicated to the talk describing the use of Acceleo in industrials projects. After an introduction of the Acceleo Project (its history, its goals) by Etienne, the first talk was done by Erle Le gac from CapGemini.

He made a feedback on a software factory that he and his team built using Acceleo and Obeo Designer. He use this product to create a complete modeling/generating chain dedicated to improve the JEE development within CapGemini. He wanted to made a demonstration of this software factory but the demo effect associated with a live practical experiment of the murphy's law prevent him to finish his example.

Then it was the perfect moment for a coffee break :)

Once the quota of caffeine back to the normal. The next feedback could be done. There was Vincent Fady from Atos Origin who described the use of Acceleo in some projects of Atos and the deployement of them, Olivier Leal from Bull who explained the strategy of Bull to industrialize their development with Acceleo. Finally, Samuel Liard from the Orange Labs came to give a feedback of Orange in the use of MDA and the the way they integrate tools like Acceleo in their development process.

Thanks for his very interesting feedbacks !

This introduction and these 4 talks done, it was time to feed our starving stomachs !

Another cool meeting !

2009-05-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

After Java Productivity tour 3 weeks ago, I could participate to the first edition of "Jeudis des modèles". Theses meeting take place in EMN Nantes every two months and deal with the Model Driven Engineering.

So, thuesday there was two presenters for this first time :

Nicolas Rouquette from the JPL, NASA
And Patrick Albert from ILog (IBM)

The first talk (from Nicolas) introduced the use of models in the JPL and especially why NASA came to use the models in its software design process. Nicolas, who defines the Software design methodology, explained the evolution in the way of create software that drive the lander sent on mars. Of course, this kind of software must be very robust and it design became more and more harder this last years.
So JPL had to improve again and again its design process and with the growing complexity of this process, they came to using models since 10 years now.

The talk of Patrick describes the evolution of software design in ILog. During the ILog evolution, they realized that there was an important part of programming that didn't implies algorithmic but only business rules. Theses rules could be defined by end-users if the way to express it was enough easy.
In this approach, they decided to create a language easy to understand that allow to defines theses rules. With the years, they naturally came to use the DSL part of the MDE.

Finally, these two very interested talks described two different ways to come to using models. It was very instructive to see other uses of the MDA that the one we apply every day and I hope can participate to the next edition.

I wanted to add some pictures I took during the conference but the camera of my cell made very ugly shots and I definitively can't show you them. Perhaps it's time to ask for a cell with 10Mpxl camera ... :)

JavaEE Productivity Tour - Great meeting !

2009-04-08T23:33:00.000-07:00

Thuesday took place in Nantes (La Beaujoire) the JavaEE Productivity tour. It was a presentation of three companies Obeo, ProxiAD and SpringSource dealing with their feedback on productivity in the JavaEE world.

First, Arnaud Buisine, from ProxiAD, presented the current state of his company about project industrialisation. His presentation deals with many topic like :

The choice of frameworks
The choice of code generation
The quality process
The developper post : settings and building
...

Then comes Julien Dubois from SpringSource. His part dealt with the productivity in the framework point of view. He talk about :

Spring what it does and what it will do !
Groovy
Grails

Finally, Etienne from Obeo, shows our tooling dedicated to JavaEE productivity. It was the moment to talk about :

Acceleo and Acceleo Pro
Obeo designer
And Obeo Network

After this 3h30 of presentation, It was the time to lunch and discuss about this topic. Interesting topics make interesting audience and interesting audience implies exciting discuss.

The JavaEE productivity tour will take place in another site soon and I hope It will come back next year in Nantes for new exchange on our wild JavaEE world :)

Welcome on my modeling blog

2009-04-04T03:48:00.000-07:00

Here we go !
I've just open my blog dedicated to my work in the Eclipse modeling world.

Currently, I work on the EEF project which aim at providing a new framework to the Eclipse user to design advanced editing components. Once these are designed they can be include in SWT/JFace elements as tabbed properties sheets or JFace wizard.

Here is two examples of the EEF generation result :

In a tabbed properties sheet page :

In a JFace wizard :

After a good Proposal Phase (with some propositions of several interested parties), we currently work on the Creation Review for EEF. Thanks to everybody who help us to create this exciting project !