Another cool meeting !

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 !

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

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 !