Eclipse Summit Europe @ Modeling Symposium

Modeling Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe

I did not attend the Modeling Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe this year. But many blogs and twits  are reporting on it.

One of the most complete description may be found on Mad Meiers’s blog:

http://madmeierslife.blogspot.com/2010/11/eclipse-summit-europe-modeling.html

I have particularly noticed the following items in his blog:

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Frederic Madiot uses EMF to represent Eclipse 3.x plug-ins with MoDisco which is a technology to renovate legacy systems using a model based approach. His presentation shows how to apply the technology to Eclipse plug-ins and how it can be used to support the migrationto E4.

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Remi Schnekenburger and Patrick Tessier continue the presentations after a break showing the impressive progress Papyrus has made since last year. Papyrus supports standard languages like UML or SysML but also DSL‘s. UML profiles with custom shapes are supported giving UML based DSL’s an appropriate visual representation.

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Aurelien Pupier shows Bonita Studio which has leveraged graphical modeling power for customization of its user interface. The interface looks really nice and it demonstrates the potential GMF has.

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Markus Voelter demonstrates the integration of a type system into Xtext. The appoach includes verification rules implemented as far as possible declaratively in Java.

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Stephan Eberle gives an update on the Eclipse Modeling Platform, the requirements (version management, collaboration, auditing, …), strategy and direction. Companies interested to join the initiative are invited to contact Ian Skerrett.

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But what is really interesting are the conclusions of Mäd Meiers on this event. I quote them below:

Here are some subjective comments and observations:

• As last year many interesting technologies are presented – it would be great to see each of them with a practical use case and with the experiences made applying the technology in practice. Often the new technologies are just applied to existing Eclipse technologies instead of using a real world example.
• In some case it stays unclear what the intended purpose or use case of the technology is. They seem more to demonstrate the cool things enabled by the Eclipse technologies. Maybe an idea for the next symposium is to ask all presenters to list some of the intended or already implemented use cases.
• Some of the examples seem to show that we as IT like to do work for IT – merging two BPMN 2 definitions to allow to produce two BPMN interchange formats.
• The strategy to develop graphical model editors seems not very clear as substantial efforts go into GMF based editors while in parallel Graphiti is shaping up.

Thanks Mäd