Some news about EEF project

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 ...

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 ...

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 !

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 !