MDA4eclipse - by Etienne Juliot

Eclipse Demo Camp 2009 in Paris with Acceleo and OD

2009-11-12T11:07:00.002+01:00

Next week, November 17th, come in Paris to see Eclipse Community and news of Eclipse projects.
I co-organise this event with Cedric Vidal , a very nice guy with lots of cool ideas on model driven and EMF, and we want to promote talks with live demos and few slides (I hate "slideware talks").
We success

Some very nice talks will be propose on Birt, XText, UI (with XWT and Wazaabi) and a "guess star" with an introduction of Mike Milinkovich (Executive Director of the Eclipse Fondation).

Jonathan Musset will talk about the new features of Eclipse Acceleo project. This demo has been shown at Eclipse Summit Europe and was very impressive by the quality of the template editor which is perhaps the best editor of Eclipse platform, just after JDT.

We will also make some demo of Obeo Designer, our Eclipse Modeling distribution with a new exciting tooling to create GMF designers without any Java code (during our demo, we will create from scratch a new nice designer).

Info on the Eclipse wiki page:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_DemoCamps_November_2009/Paris

Register on http://eclipsedemocampparis09.eventbrite.com/
or directly with this form:

Acceleo nominated at Eclipse Technology Awards

2009-02-04T14:27:00.003+01:00

Acceleo project has been nominated for the Eclipse Award in the category "Best Open Source Eclipse-Based Developer Tool".
I really think Acceleo can win because it proposes some nice Eclipse tooling, but also because it proves a real community of users and contributors with an open development process.

Last year, it was EclEmma which won.

Icon set for post-ganymede version of Eclipse SCA

2008-07-01T10:00:00.000+02:00

Hi,

I just work on some new icons for Eclipse SCA project.
I need some comments to choose which one need to be removed or changed.

On my point of view, it will be nicer than the v1.0 version because it will better fit Eclipse UI and icons style.

New global palette:

SCA Bindings:

SCA Implementations:

SCA Interfaces:

The new tree Editor:
The graphical Designer isn't ready because it uses old style for embedded icons.
For comment, you can use this bug report.

Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede: News and Noteworthy by projects

2008-06-27T16:22:00.004+02:00

Eclipse Ganymede has just been released.

Here are list of new features of modeling projects:

GMF 2.1
MDT 1.1 (OCL, EODM, UML2, XSD)

ATL 2.0

There are other projects (like Jet, QVT-O, ...) but there haven't a News and Noteworthy page.

ATL 2

2008-06-13T10:26:00.003+02:00

ATL v2 will be release very soon.
ATL is a model transformation engine based on MDA standard and Eclipse platform.
It can used for:
- interoperability between tools
- translate a model from a notation to another (for example: relational to uml)
- propose "different zooms" on a model (for example: global specification -> detailled specification -> global design -> ...)
- create any kind of bridge (for example: BPMN -> BPEL or BPMN -> SCA)

ATL 2 is provide some new exciting features:
- better completion on model elements
- virtual machin based on EMF
- better performance
- lots of bug fixes
- a clean updatesite
- integration inside Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4)
- and a new commercial support on http://www.atl-pro.com

See News and Noteworthy for more detail on ATL 2.

Eclipse SCA 1.0

2008-06-12T14:10:00.003+02:00

After one year of work, Eclipse SCA 1.0 is ready.

This is a new project of Eclipse STP (Soa Tool Platform) for assembly of SOA applications.
To understand the goal of SCA standard (Service Component Architecture, available here), the easiest way is to use an example:
you have one GUI component (for exemple, C# based) named "A" and it need to communicate with one business component "B" write EJB and Java and with another external component "C" written in PHP and only accessible with WebService. With SCA, you just need to declare each component, a reference (required interface) on A (declare with C# interface), and two services on B and C.
The SCA server will automaticly translate protocols and API language to ensure everybody can communicate with everybody.
In a nutshell, SCA isn't a new middleware (it rely on existing middlewares or libraries). It's like Spring, but as a specification and for any protocols and languages.

The main feature of Eclipse SCA project is a nice designer. It's used color and shape very similar of official specification and it's based on GMF. I'm one of the commiters team of this project and the leader is Stephane Drapeau.

It will be bundle inside Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4).
You can test it and read this nice tutorial.

Statechart diagram generation

2007-09-05T10:22:00.001+02:00

As a proof of concept, we create an Acceleo generator for UML2 Statechart diagram.
This generator has been made as a TopCased work (to be include, I hope, as a built-in TopCased generator).

Here is a nice flash demo: http://www.obeo.fr/download/transfert/capture1.htm

The source code generated uses Smuc framework, but it will be easy to target any standard technology (like C, Java, ...).
Thanks to Cedric Notot for all his work on this generator and who experiment new strategies for models validation with Acceleo.

EMF on Rhapsody

2007-05-14T15:16:00.000+02:00

Have you ever see EMF with Rhapsody ?

Let's see : http://www.rhapsody.com/emf

Is that you, Ed, with the black tee shirt ?
Very good :)

Acceleo 2.0 : free module for UML2 to Hibernate

2007-05-05T12:16:00.000+02:00

For Acceleo v2.0 and launching of Acceleo Modules Farm, Obeo will release with an OpenSource license one of its commercial modules : UML2Hibernate.

I have create this module. It uses UML 2.1 models (class diagram with < < stereotype > >) and generates :

- DAO layer
- Entity objects
- HBM mapping
- SQL tables (3NF)
- JUnit tests
- Hibernate v3 compatible Design Patterns

It manages lots of associations :
- inheritance
- 1-1
- 1-*
- *-*
- recursive associations
- unidirectionnal and bidirectionnal associations
- ...

It will be available before the end of may. I hope you will enjoy it, and you will contribue to improve its features.
Here is the link where this module will be available : http://www.acceleo.org/pages/modules-repository/

My son, you will be a chief !

2007-05-04T10:55:00.000+02:00

Students : stop to think you NEED to be a project chief to be someone !

I see lots of young IT engineers, who just come out from their high schools, and want to manage projects. Oh yeah, Excel, MS Project should be very exciting !

NO ! You can have a very good job and a very good carrier with some technical skills. IT is complex, and architecture is not easy for everybody. It's fun, there are some evolution every day, and companies needs some very good people to understand and create good architectural designs.

IT architecture is one the more interesting job I even see.

Welcome to planet Acceleo

2007-05-04T10:51:00.000+02:00

Planet Acceleo is online.
My blog is aggregated inside this planet.

http://planet.acceleo.org

Papyrus 1.6 is released with Acceleo !

2007-05-03T16:34:00.000+02:00

Papyrus, one of the best OpenSource UML modeleur on the Eclipse platform has been released.

http://www.papyrusuml.org/

Papyrus includes a new killer feature : Java code generation from UML models.

And which generative engine does they choose ? Yeah ! Acceleo.

Obeo has joigned Papyrus community to help them to create this Java generator.
Of course, this generator is under EPL license.

Acceleo 2.0RC2 has been used, with some specific integration plugins like this one (for the Run... menu) :

MDE / MDA / MDSD / etc.

2007-04-20T15:54:00.000+02:00

OMG has defined the MDA term.

But now, what a jungle !
Let's see some very simple definitions.

MDE
- Model Driven Engineering
- definition : all the process of creating softwares with a model driven approach.
- examples : it includes some metamodel based analysis, how to manage teams with MDA,
which steps are required to create a real model based software factory, ...

MDA
- Model Driven Architecture
- definition : the technical choice of tool and metamodel for all the creation of a new software
- examples : transformation models engines, separation and links between PIM/CIM/and others

MDSD
- Model Driven Software Development (also call MDD : Model Driven Development)
- definition : metamodel based tools and process for development step
- examples : source code generation (like Acceleo), PSM model based editor

DSM
- Domain Specific Modeling (and DSL : Domain Specific Language)
- definition : metamodel based modelers to design specific and semantical models
- examples : GMF based modelers, Workflow modelers, Wysiwig model based modelers

ADM
- Architecture Driven Modernization
- definition : modernize existing software with a metamodel approach
- examples : reverse engineering systems, recasting engine (like Agility)

Of course, let's do a metamodel of theses model driven definitions :

Work on Acceleo 2

2007-04-20T15:47:00.000+02:00

Acceleo (http://www.acceleo.org) is a very impressive code generator.
I work on it since 2005 (v0.0.1 !!).

Acceleo v1.0 was born in 2006/04/01, with many features and a very good EMF and Eclipse integration.

Acceleo v2.0 will be the major evolution of Acceleo with 2 main features :
- modules generator can be deployed as real plugins
- open source modules farm

Acceleo v2.0 should be release on may 2007.

Blog new born

2007-04-20T15:44:00.000+02:00

After an unsuccess try of creating my blog, I think this time will be the good one.
As you see, I decide to speak english.... Or try to speak english !

I will speak about :
- MDA
- IT Architecture
- Acceleo
- DSM

Mozilla 2

2004-06-14T12:10:00.000+02:00

Voici une URL qui cause de Mozilla 2 :
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/005689.html

On y apprend par exemple :
- python supporté dans les pages web
- javascript 2.0
- début de support d'XForms (coool)
- SVG supporté (pour moi, la plus grosse nouveauté)
- XUL 2 (et standardisé)
- xulrunner
- bien sur, utilisation de Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird et Nvu.

javafr.org au point mort

2004-06-04T16:05:00.000+02:00

Il y a maintenant 1 an 1/2, j'ai acheté le nom de domaine javafr.org et j'ai commencé une maquette avec Spip pour créer un site de news dy style a19s.com ou linuxfr.org, sur Java.
Je l'avais fait hébergé par tuxfamily, mais l'histoire a voulu que tuxfamily ferme ses portes.

Depuis, je n'ai pas trouvé le temps de m'y remettre. La backend est prêt (merci spip), il reste encore le squelette des pages web à mettre au point (CSS à gogo). Il faut aussi que je remette en place la redirection DNS. En fait, j'espère qu'en maintenant ce blog, ca me donnera le courage de m'y remettre.

Si quelqu'un d'autre est partant pour l'aventure, qu'il me contacte. C'est bien plus motivant à plusieurs.

Premier pas en conteneurs légers

2004-06-04T15:27:00.000+02:00

Je suis en train de me former aux conteneurs légers. Ca semble être un sacré changement de mentalité par rappot aux EJBs.

J'aimerai pouvoir une chaine complète modélisation des besoins -> modélisation UML -> génération code -> plugins Eclipse d'aide au dév -> résultat.
J'ai essayé :
- EMF : cela semble surtout dédié à servir de base à d'autres outils (enfin pour l'instant).
- Middlegen : partir de la base pour modéliser le métier, c'est pas trop mon truc (je préfère faire de l'orienté objet qui se mappe dans une BD plutot que l'inverse)
- XDoclet : j'aime pas trop le mélange induit par l'ajout en javadoc de tag de déploiement. Je préfère garder le Java propre. (mais je n'y suis pas fermé pour autant)

Pour les frameworks, je vais essayer :
- hibernate
- spring
- struts / jsf

Pourquoi ces choix ? Et bien parce que les EJB3 semblent prendre cette voie. Donc, autant anticipé !!

Rendez vous d'ici quelques jours (j'espère) pour mes premières impressions.

Et c'est parti

2004-05-12T15:59:00.000+02:00

Et voici mon premier post sur mon tout nouveau Blog.
Je te souhaite bon anniversaire, pour tes 5 premières minutes !!

Je ne suis pas encore très sûr de l'utilisation que je vais en faire. J'y parlerai sûrement technique et informatique, mais ptet aussi sur des sujets annexes (comme un peu tous les blogs qu'on peut trouver sur le web).

Wait and see ... et longue vie à juliot.blogspot.com !!