Eclipse Summit Europe 2009

This year was my first attending ESE, and it was worth it !

The talks on modeling were very interesting (Xtext, EMFQuery, Papyrus, ...) and it was nice to meet the guys directly involved in the projects we are interested in.

The Cloudsmith team, for example, to discuss how we could use MoDisco on the B3 project to analyse plugins and create models of builds. Or André Dietisheim about our tests with CDO to manage models of large Java applications created with MoDisco. Nice also to talk with Kenn, Ed, Ralph and many others.

I had the chance to talk during both the Modeling Symposium (Tuesday) and a session dedicated to MoDisco (Thursday).

With my colleague Gabriel Barbier of Mia-Software, who presented the demo Thursday, we shown how to create fine-grained models from Java source code (based on a Java.ecore metamodel), and how to navigate through this model with the model browser we have developped. We put the focus on the customization and the extensibility of this browser by using queries.

You can dynamically change the icon, color, font ... of the instances of your models (by defining a UICustomization, stored in a EMF model), or add "virtual" types (not originally defined in your Ecore metamodel) with "virtual" properties and references (by defining a RoleSet, also stored in a EMF model). The query mechanism that we provide is generic : it allows integrating queries written in Java, EMFQuery, OCL, XPath or ATL.


We presented the 0.8 version which is still under development (planned for the end of 2009). But thanks to Nicolas Bros who have put the releng in place, it is possible to download an integration build.

The demos are online :
- Demo during the Modeling Symposium
- Demo during the MoDisco short talk