“ Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler ” probably was one of the mantra the Eclipse Modeling Framework team (Ed Merks, Marcelo Paternostro, Dave Steinberg among others…) sticked to when they created the core concepts which would allow the definition of all the others tools. Ecore is a kernel, you define your domain-specific model using these constructs. It boils down to...

After being presented for two years in many conferences and schools, the Sirius tutorial based on the Mindstorms Robot case-study has been made publicly available on the Sirius wiki . This tutorial explains how to use Eclipse Sirius to create a graphical editor for piloting a Mindstorms Robot.  The graphical editor allows to describe a sequence of instructions (going forward, rotating, grabing or ...

Every year the Eclipse M7 milestone act as a very strong deadline for the projects which are part of the release train: it’s then time for polishing and refining! When your company is responsible for a number of inter-dependent projects some of them core technologies like EMF Services , the GMF Runtime, others user facing tools like Acceleo , Sirius or EcoreTools , packaging and integration orient...

At Obeo, we believe that modeling is the right way to help IT and industry engineers collaborate efficiently on the design of their smart products. Our innovative approach consists of building specific modeling tools that completely suit users’ business domains. Modeling is a means to an end: by using modeling technologies we make sure that such a tool can be defined faster, as well as deployed an...

A few weeks ago I ended up on the following thread on the EMF Forum asking for Ecore meta-model formal documentation? . Ed pointed at some documentation which includes diagrams done with great care but done with tools from another era.   As the maintainer of EcoreTools I had to do something about it, and so I did: All participants in the Ecore Modeling Framework implement the EObject's interface  ...

This article is the second part of a series focusing on metamodel design (more especially Ecore models). Following the first part focused on some ground rules this second part is focused on slightly more technical aspects: scalability and Java. The general disclaimer still applies: Most of the checks stated here are very easy to comply with when considered from the start but might not be that chea...

Be meticulous with the model describing your domain! So many aspects of your tool will trickle down from your Ecore model that it pays a lot to pause for a bit and do some basic sanity checks. The Ecore model in the center is the basis for so many things! Eclipse Modeling technologies are enabling you to build graphical, tree or textual editors, connectors to import or export data, code generators...