EMF Facet, a new project for model customization and extensibility

How to dynamically extend and combine existing Ecore definitions without having to modify them?

EMF Facet, a new project we have proposed to create under EMFT, will propose dynamic extension mechanisms for all EMF-based tools exposing a view on a model:

• Navigation tools (browser, navigator, etc);
• Graphical modeling tools;
• Code or documentation generation (M2T) tools;
• Model-to-model transformation (M2M) tools.

Our proposition provides a solution to introduce new viewpoints (or "facets") on existing models:

• Extending an existing metamodel (Ecore model) in a non-intrusive way by adding new types, attributes, operations and relations. New relations could be used to compose several models by linking their elements.
• Computing an extension by executing queries against an existing model; queries will be implemented by making use of existing query mechanisms (e.g. considering Java, ATL, EMFQuery, Xpath, etc)

The Query "subClassifiers" visible as a "virtual" relation on Class

Some of these mechanisms have already been developped in the MoDisco project. But, as they could be reused by tools not related to software modernization (the scope of the MoDisco project), we have decided to contribute the corresponding components to EMF Facet.

In a previous post, I have presented these components (Facet Manager and Query Manager).

In another post, I have also illustrated how Facets can be used to extend the Java metamodel to highlight JUnit concepts.

Back from EclipseCon 2010

I came back to home today, after one week at Santa-Clara, near San-Francisco, attending my second EclipseCon.

Last year, I only presented a poster. But this year I gave a talk about MoDisco and I participated to the Modeling Project runway organized by Kenn Hussey. Gabriel Barbier, my colleague from Mia-Software, had also a talk with Henrik Lindberg about B3 and the possibility to use MoDisco to extract build information from source code .



Once again, I really enjoyed the conference and its organization: lots of interesting talks, very good keynotes (Steve Harris show was THE event of the week), but most of all it is the best way to share ideas, to meet people and to show what we working on.

This year, we spent a lot of time explaining a project we propose to create. The EMF Facet project will provide mechanisms to dynamically extend ECore models: adding properties, references, operations without changing the initial ECore model. These mechanisms have already been developped as part of the MoDisco project. We propose to externalize them to make them more reusable by other projects. We received very good feedback on this project from all the Modeling Project members to whom we presented our ideas and the existing components. We will first submit the proposal to the Modeling PMC next week.