If you attend EclipseCon, try to catch them and ask them questions about EMF, Acceleo, EMF Compare, EEF, Mylyn Intent, Obeo Designer, Polarsys, Buildroot, ... they have a lot to say and to show about these topics!
IntelHome Designer: a graphical designer to configure home automation systems for disabled persons. This is what Willy Allegre, of South Brittany University, has prototyped with Obeo Designer during his thesis at LAB-STICC laboratory.
IntelHome Designer consists in modeling a home with all its automated equipments. The model is used to generate configuration files for DANAH, a assistive technology system that pilots automated homes or medical structures. It provides users (elderly and the disabled) with a human machine interface to automate daily tasks.
The graphical designer allows non DANAH-expert persons to describe the environment (the home and its equipments) and the possible interactions between the users and these equipments.
This case-study illustrates a more and more widespread use of DSL (Domain Specific Language): models can be directly created by non-IT users in order to configure their applications. In a previous post, I already presented a similar case-study where models are used to configure an Insurance system.
This is made possible by new generations of tools, such as Obeo Designer, which greatly reduce the time to create graphical designers dedicated to a given DSL.
The evening, just after the roadshow, I have been invited by Toulouse JUG for a 15' talk.
I presented a live demo of Obeo Designer: from zero, I created a new graphical designer (definition of an Ecore model, generation of the EMF source code, creation of a sample model and definition of a diagram).
The presentation (in french) has been recorded. It is available on Parleys.com.
At the end, while I was presenting an existing designer (Graal Designer, a designer created for the french Ministry of Defence) Etienne, who was attending the presentation with his own machine, connected to my machine and hacked my diagram in live!
An interesting use-case of collaborative modeling ;-)
There were also four other presentations: GTB (by Baptiste Mathus), Jenkins (by Michaël Pailloncy), JavaFX2 (by Sebastien Bordes) and Scala (by Didier Plaindoux). These presentations are also on Parleys.com.
Thank you to Nicolas Zozol and Baptiste Mathus for the invitation to this event and its organization.
It allows several users to simultaneously edit a model and its diagrams. Thanks to the fine-grained locking mechanism, only the concerned model elements are locked, and automaticaly released once the modifications are saved.
Now, I will explain how to share a local modeling project on a server, in order to use this collaborative mode and to allow other users to collaborate with you on the same model.
To share a model with several users, only three steps are needed with Obeo Designer.
1) Start the server
The shared model must be hosted on a CDO server which has to be installed and started.
This can be done very easily with the sample CDO servers provided with Obeo Designer. These servers are available through Obeo Designer examples and can be launched with prebuilt Launch Configurations.
Once again, Obeo will hit the road with its hot new technologies and products in the bag.
We will meet with our partners, customers and technical community through three main events.
Obeo Designer Roadshow 2012
After the success of 2011's edition, we will organize a new roadshow which will pass through 4 cities in France:
Nantes (18/10)
Toulouse (15/11)
Paris (20/11)
Grenoble (6/12)
Each day is free and composed of two parts:
The morning, we will present how custom graphical designers can help in managing complexity and how to create this kind of tools with Obeo Designer. Then, we will let our partners and customers to present case-studies where they have used Obeo Designer. For the first date, in Nantes, case-studies will be presented by MMA and Thales Services.
The afternoon, is dedicated to a "hands-on" session. We encourage each participant to come with its own idea of a graphical designer. And, with the help of Obeo experts, we promise that everyone leave with a first version of a running designer!
Last year, participants left with designers for robots, SOA systems, IT infrastructure, authorization management, etc...
At the end, we will keep time to allow participants to install SmartEA on their PC and to play with a sample model.
Obeo SmartEA allows Enterprise Architects to define their existing and target architectures (As-Is and To-Be), to evaluate gap analysis and define transformation scenarios. It provides:
a
graphical environment based on Eclipse to edit TOGAF models
a
viewpoint technology based on Obeo Designer to create new kinds of
representations
a
database repository to store the models and to allow collaborative
work (technology based on Eclipse CDO)
connectors
to federate existing information with the repository
architectural
tools to study evolution plans and to analyze their impacts
a web
client to navigate and to search into the models
EclipseCon Europe 2012
Last but not the least, like each year, Obeo will be present at Ludwigsburg (Germany) for the annual Eclipse conference in Europe.
The classical approach to collaborate on the same model is usually to split the model into several files managed with a source control system such as SVN.
There are two major problems to this approach:
lock granularity: it is not reasonable to create a file by model element. So, each time you need to modify an object, you lock all the other model elements contained in the same file.
real-time updates: when a modification occurs, the other users have to manually reload the files which contain the changes
The solution provided with Obeo Designer consists in a CDO-based repository which contains shared models and their representations (diagrams, tables and trees).
Each time a user changes the property of a model element, only this element is locked. The author of the modification sees a green padlock on the element, while other users instantly see a red padlock on each representation where the same element is visible.
On the example below, the family Smith and the man Paul are locked.
Once the modification is saved, the changes are automaticaly reflected to the other users.
I have created this video to illustrate the collaboration mechanism.
Modeling Satellites Software
Architecture, a European Space Agency research initiative
Would you
develop a satellite application the same way you develop a
«classic» application ?
Of course not!
When developing
an application embedded in a satellite, a software engineer has to deal with
many additional constraints:
1.The software
platform is constrained by so many factors (energy consumption, temperature, scarce
computational power and memory size, etc) that general purpose methodologies
are not always applicable.
2.Computation time
and duration must be highly predictable in order to satisfy the complex
orchestration of actions performed by the satellite.
3. As failures may lead to loss of
mission, catastrophic damages or loss of lives, the quality of the software
drives the development process
In order to
support these constraints, the European
Space Agency (ESA) has initiated an investigation for the realization of a software reference architecture (SRA) for
on-board software. Based on solid scientific foundations and industrial
feedback, the SRA aims at providing a common framework which can be reused for
multiple missions in the space domain.
Marco Panunzio at
the University of Padova(Italy) contributed to the investigation on
the SRA during is PhD and later his post-doc. In his work, he defined the key
principles, formulated a component model compliant with these principles, and
developed a graphical modeling tool based on Eclipse and Obeo
Designer for the development of on-board software compliant with the SRA.
The results were
periodically submitted to a working group comprising space stakeholders, for
assessment and refinement.
The cornerstone principle
of the SRA is separation of concerns,
which is used in order to separate different aspects of software design
(functional and non-functional concerns, actor's area of expertise, etc) and
address them with the best-fit formalisms, tools and verification techniques. Other key principles of SRA are composability,
compositionality, property preservation and composition with guarantees.
These principles have driven Marco Panunzio to the
definition of a component model which supports the concept of Design Views in
order to decompose the global architecture of the system into more detailled
constituents. Each Design View represents self-contained concerns relevant to a
given stakeholder. A Design View can define its own rules (visualization and
modification rights, graphical representation, constraints, verification, etc).
At the present
state of the investigation, the SRA comprises six Design Views:
·Data
·Component
·Behavioural
·Hardware/Deployment
·Non Functional
·Implementation/Analysis
It is also complemented
by domain-specific views. For example, a view has been implemented for the PUS
(Packet Utilization Standard), to define the use of services which involve the transfer
of telemetry and telecommand data between the ground segment and on-board
applications.
SRA Design Views
To create a
satellite application according to this component model, a tool has been
developed in Eclipse. It supports the seven
aforementioned views via 19 kinds of diagrams and 8 kinds of tables. These
views are completed by validation rules and specific actions (for intensive
computations).
To develop these
views, Marco Panunzio selected EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) and Obeo
Designer. The resulting editor was
later adopted and refined in subsequent ESA-funded studies.
Two strategies have been considered:
·UML with a
specific profile
·a DSL (Domain
Specific Model)
Because of the gap between the concepts of the SRA
component model and those defined by UML, using UML in this context would have
introduced unnecessary complexity. That's the reason why an Ecore metamodel
(called SCM) implementing the component model concepts was developed. With this
approach, the tool natively supports the component model of the SRA.
Then, to
implement the diagrams which allow the user to edit and visualize the
components, Obeo Designer was chosen.
Another alternative would have been to directly use GMF.
But
implementing 19 specific diagrams would have consumed most of the effort to the
detriment of realizing and perfectioning the approach.
On the contrary, with Obeo Designer, the design
views have been implemented much faster with a better support for extensibility
and incremental adaptations. Most of all, it permitted fast iterations with
stakeholders in the prototypal phase for delicate points of the methodology.
Below, you can see some examples of the diagrams
created with Obeo Designer.
Hardware diagram: declaration of the processing units, sensors, actuators, devices and the
interconnections between them
Hardware diagram
Processor board diagram: declaration of the internals of a processor board in terms of processors, processor cores, cache and memory banks.
Processor board diagram
PUS component instance diagram: monitoring and reporting of on-board parameters,
commanding of on-board operations from the ground segment, etc…
PUS component instance diagram
This
initiative is a concrete contribution to the development of an
on-board software reference architecture for future satellite
systems.
Relying
on a complete component model and an associated graphical editor, SRA
is currently used by several ESA-funded studies which are
consolidating and validating the approach and the tools.
