Creating a new Ecore model with Obeo Designer 6.0

One of the cool things coming with Obeo Designer 6.0 is the new "Ecore Modeling Project" creation wizard.

It automatically creates an EMF project containing an Ecore model and its corresponding genmodel. This project is also created with the Modeling Project nature and a Obeo Designer representation file (.aird) containing a diagram (depending on the viewpoint selected with the wizard).

This diagram is automatically opened and you can directly start graphically design your Domain Model.

Once you have defined your packages, classes, attributes, relations, ... you just have to open the genmodel and generate the EMF code. Of course you can customize the genmodel to introduce your own generation choices.

This video demonstrates this new wizard on a simple Ecore model.

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.

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