An Eclipse Modeling Week

Last week, I participated to Eclipse Summit Europe 2010 in Germany.

I started tuesday with a talk at the Eclipse Modeling Symposium (you can read my previous post: Using EMF to represent Eclipse 3.x plug-ins , and a complete summary of the symposium on Ed Merks' blog).

Then thursday, with Grégoire Dupé, I presented EMF Facet, the new Eclipse/Modeling project we have created to allow dynamic extensions of existing EMF models.

EMF Facet at ESE 2010

We have finished the week friday, at Eclipse Day Paris, by a presentation of MoDisco, the Eclipse/Modeling project dedicated to Model-Driven Software Modernization.

MoDisco at Eclipse Day Paris 2010

Now, we can come back to a normal activity ... until MD Day 2010, the 25th of November in Paris.

EMF Facet project has been created

EMF Facet is a new Eclipse/Modeling project which will provide solutions to extend existing metamodels without changing them. It has been provisioned recently in EMFT by Greg Dupé of Mia-Software, the co-leader of the project.

With EMF Facet, it will be more easy to dynamically extend and customize a tool based on EMF.

The idea is to allow defining new attributes, new relations and new types in a non-intrusive way (you can read this older post about EMF Facet).

This mechanism has already been developped in the MoDisco project (the Eclipse/Modeling project dedicated to Software Modernization). It is completed by a QueryManager component which allow executing queries on a EMF model independently from the query technology (bridges for OCL, Java and XPath are already available). As it is independent from Software Modernization purposes, the corresponding code is going to move to this new EMF Facet project.

After some refactoring, it will be enriched with other components (such as customizable widgets to display extended EMF models). First version is planned to be ready in June 2011 for Indigo, the next Eclipse release. Before this date, early versions will be available with intermediate Indigo milestones.

To know more about this project, don't miss the talk EMF Facet: a Non-Intrusive Metamodel Extension Tooling, Thursday, the 4th of November during Eclipse Summit Europe 2010, in Germany.