mardi 31 octobre 2017

Last day at Obeo

Today is my last day in Obeo.

I started there 11 years ago and it has to be said that we started from not much!




Year after year, we have built a set of products and solutions offering more and more functionalities to our customers, covering an increasingly wide functional domain (generation, transformation, custom modelling,...).



The way we built the Obeo products might seem magical from the outside, but it was the result of the hard work of the company and the passion of its employees... my colleagues.



This fantastic period allowed me to evolve day after day, on all a set of aspects that I would not have imagined when I arrived: development, architecture, project management, customers care, marketing,...

All these skills will allow me to assume my new functions in my new company. Indeed, I join Digitemis to take on the role of Product Owner. Mainly, I will drive the roadmap of the company's products in order to provide tools that will best meet the needs of our customers.


I have a whole new set of challenges await me, but I'm joining Digitemis with confidence thanks to what I learned in Obeo.


All I have to do now is to wish you an happy continuation Obeo, a lot of new challenges are waiting for you too, mainly with your departure to the west.


Good luck to those I will not see again ... and see you soon to those whose our roads will cross again.


vendredi 10 janvier 2014

New OpenSource components for a new year

Since many years, IFPEN (www.ifpen.fr) works with Obeo at the integration of the Eclipse modeling technologies in its Eclipse based scientific software platform.


This collaboration resulted in the creation of some modeling components built on the top of EMF. Since these components are generic and can be used by any EMF models consumers, IFPEN decided to free them.

We created an EclipseLabs project in order to share these components: IFPEN EMP Tooling
At the time being, 3 modules are hosted in the project:
  • Reverse module: a tool using the JDT to create a Ecore model representing the selected java code
  • Filter: a tool allowing to filter a EMF model in order to limit an Acceleo generation
  • Cuboid Modeler: a showcase for the EEF project. 
These modules are designed to be easy to use and to provide common needs encountered by many EMF users.

Feel free to use them, improve them or just give us feedback and Happy New Year!.

lundi 1 avril 2013

Goodbye ECon 2013, Such a good time!

This year, I had the chance to attend EclipseCon once again. Like each time, it was a great moment for many reasons.

1- Contents

 

I presented two talks this year, so I haven't be able to attend many sessions. But, in the EMF community we are fortunate to have great speakers. Attending sessions of Ed Merks or Eike Stepper still is a great time!

Ed presented the result of its work on the EMF performances. This session was composed of 3 parts:

  • Some tips on the way to work on software performances.
  • An important reminder of the fact of trusting nothing and nobody (what a party guy Ed!).
  • And finally a presentation of the methodology and the work done for improving EMF performances.
Even if it's part of the software development’s foundations, it's always a good to remember the importance of taking care of software performance.

The only problem of this session was the lack of time, 70 slides in 35 minutes remains a big challenge hard to meet!

Eike presented a very complete tutorial for developing RCP applications based on EMF. I hope to work one day with Eike to include a demonstration of EEF dealing with the UI part of this application! :)
During this session, Eike made a demonstration of one of his superpowers: the ability to sketch a full RCP application in less than a minute without effort!!! So amazing :)

2- The Eclipse community and my sessions

 

Like I said before, I presented two sessions this year....

2.1- Documentation Driven Testing 

 

During this talk, Alex and I presented the result of the work we've done on the EEF tests.
This work aims at implementing a brand new methodology to develop and maintain functional tests. The idea is to fully drive the test development by the documentation.
Indeed, these last years, many projects like SWTBot or Intent have been created. These project allow the design of high quality tooling for tests development.
The tooling we’ve developed is composed of 3 parts:

  • An extension of Intent has been created to allow users embedding models directly in the Intent document. By doing so, there is no risk of non-synchronization between the documentation and the models since they are inferred by the documentation.
  • An EMF model for functional tests modeling. By instantiating this model, an user is able to sequentially define a list of actions to describe a test scenario. Associated to this model, a SWTBot interpreter has been developed to read the model instances and execute the defined tests.
  • Finally, in order to ease the test modeling process, an XText syntax has been created. A functional user is able to describe a test by writing an actions sequence with a language very similar to natural language.
     
The idea behind this tooling is to ease the tests creation process, and to invite the user who is responsible for this process to keep a complete and synchronized test documentation by refocusing the test tooling on the documentation.

This tooling enables users to write a document on the software they want to test and, in dedicated areas, to define the test sequence validating the behavior described by the documentation. The tool can then generate scenarios executable by SWTBot.
This tooling isn't magical, it can't force users to write documentation. However, the strategy is to invite the user to make documentation and keep it synchronized by focusing the test development process on the document. Indeed, with our tools, the way to create a new test (or to update an existing one) is to open the testing document and to change the described scenario.
I'm really convinced that if you change a test in a document and, if the paragraph just before your scenario say something wrong about this scenario, you will update this paragraph.

That's why Documentation Driven Testing exists!

 

2.2 - EMF community, move on e4! 


My second talk was a presentation of the new brand new version of EEF. I worked on a full redesign of the project I lead in the Eclipse community to help EMF users to move on the new e4 platform.
I  was very excited to show some of the new very cool features I’ve developed in EEF2.

The crazy user experience of runtime interpretation for UI rendering (yes, EEF2 doesn't generate code anymore), as well as the flexibility brought by the full OSGi design of this new architecture and the ability to switch  from one platform to another just by changing the EEF bundles loaded in your application, make me want to release very quickly a first version to let you play with it!
I will push the code I’ve developed just after my vacations in Chicago (w00t w00t) and then make a build. Don't hesitate to play with it and to give us feedback in order to make this version the coolest UI framework for the EMF community!!!

3. The Eclipse foundation staff

 

But most of all, the thing that made this EclipseCon a great moment for me was the kindness and the availability of the Eclipse foundation members.
This edition permits to see people that we're not meeting very often but who are extremely important for our daily committer job. And icing on the cake, these people are incredibly nice! It was a great opportunity for me to meet them and I really hope to see them again very soon.
I would really like to mention Anne (I already met her at the previous editions) who remains a very likeable person and the most fastest photo-shooter of the world!

And this year, I’ve met for the first time Sharon who is a really nice person (except when I had to work... she was putting pressure on me and inciting me to prepare my sessions - j/k;)). She came with the frenchies very often and gave us so many goodies from her magic bag! I was very impressed by the amount of stuffs she can store in her bag (even an iron!!!), did she stole it to Mary poppins? ;)

This year also was the opportunity to meet Roxanne who joined the Eclipse foundation staff some times ago. She speaks a very good french and she allowed me to get a free beer at the first meal, how to imagine a better way to meet somebody? ;)

I also met Pablo who was my mental coach for my second session. I'm pretty sure that this mental coaching was the main factor of the good running of my EEF2 presentation. Thank you so much Pablo, our chat before the session was an important help for me.

I finish with Nathan, and I want to make a very special kudos for this so cool guy. Indeed, you have to know that a great competition took place this year in EclipseCon to get the so cool Eclipse hoodies made by Roxanne. After many tries to get one (sorry Roxanne for putting so much pressure on you shoulders for this reason ;)), Nathan became the nicest guy of the world by giving me his hoodie and so making me the proudest man of the world:

(beat that, Mikaël ;))

So, thank you so much Nathan and I promise to bring you something from France the next time we meet!!!

Thank you everyone for this great event. I hope to see you very soon for other great adventures! ;)

lundi 11 juin 2012

Euro FootballCup 2012 : Play with us

Today the European Football Championship starts. As for the worldcup in 2010, Obeo has created a Forecast game, based on the Eclipse Modeling stack to determine who is the best "Forecaster" at Obeo.

You can play with us and try to challenge the Obeo Team!

To play with us, simply download the software for your OS :

win32 - win64 - linux32 - linux64 - macos32 - macos64

Unzip the software and launch the Euro 2012 forecast executable. Then, create a new player with your login and start to play.

The application have three pages:
  • The first page shows your login and your points
  • The second page let you create your forecasts
  • And finally the third shows the rating of the game
To make a forecast, all you have to do is to select the forecast for the match you want to edit in the second page.


Then, set the score of the two teams in the dedicated field and just save your forecast (ctrl + s). You can change your forecast up to end of the day.
Do not hesitate! Download the application and play with us! You can make your forecast up to 17 for the two matches of the day :

France - England
Ukraine - Sweden


Let's go France !

jeudi 3 novembre 2011

Why not generating EMF code with Acceleo ?

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 !

lundi 22 août 2011

EEF submissions for EclipseCon Europe



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 !


jeudi 16 juin 2011

EEF 1.0 : End of incubation !

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.