Friday, October 24, 2014

Multi-Viewpoints on EclipseCon Program

To demonstrate Sirius on short talks, I'm used to create a modeler from scratch, in ten minutes, on a topic that everybody in the audience knows: the conference they are attending.

For Eclipse Con Europe, I decided to extend this demo in order to illustrate one of Sirius' main feature : the possibility to present the same model according to different concerns.

Using Ecore Tools (based on Sirius), I created a small modeling workbench based on this DSL.



Based on this DSL, my new Conference modeling workbench provides four different representations : 3 diagrams and a cross-table.

Track Diagram

This diagram allows me to create tracks and talks, thank to the tools in the palette. For each track, I can define its speakers, the day of the talk, its location and at what hour it will be given.

Here I have created the talks by Obeo and Thales.


The container presenting each talk has a conditional style : its color depends on its duration (green if the duration exceeds 35 mn).

When populating this diagram, Sirius creates EMF objects based on the conference DSL. They can also be seen in the Model Explorer.



I have also defined two optional layers on this diagram: "Sirius" and "Speakers". Each layer allows me to dynamically change the appearance of displayed objects.



When activated, the "Sirius" layer highlights the talks containing Sirius in their title: the Sirius icon is displayed as a to-right decorator on the concerned talks, and the other talks are colored in gray.



When de-activated, the "Speaker" layer hides the speakers.


Location Diagram

This other diagram automatically presents the same talks grouped according to their location.


Days Diagram

This last diagram presents the talks grouped according to the days.


Program Table

Finally, I have also defined this table which shows the program in a classical tabular way:


Behind the scenes

These representations are simply defined without any line of code, thanks to Sirius declarative mode.


The elements of this tree define which instances of the DSL are displayed in each representation and with which graphical style.

For example, the element TalkContainer allows to display all the instances of Talk which can be retrieve through the talks reference of the current track.




Its style is defined by the Gradient white to light green element which sets the shape, the color and the label of the talk.



Friday, October 25, 2013

Launching Sirius

At Obeo, the last weeks have been very busy to launch Sirius.


Now it's done!

Sirius is here with:
  • An updatesite available from the Eclipse infrastructure
  • The integration in the Luna release train
  • A brand new website: www.eclipse.org/sirius
  • New videos


The team is ready for EclipseCon Europe 2013!

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Obeo at EclipseCon 2013

This week EclipseCon 2013 holds in Boston.


As usual, Obeo will actively participate to this event with the presence of seven of us:

Mélanie Bats

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!

But the best way remains to attend their talks:
Enjoy!

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Model-based configuration of assistive technology systems

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.


Thursday, November 22, 2012

Live demo of a graphical DSL

Last week I was in Toulouse, for the second step of Obeo Designer roadshow.

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.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

How to share a modeling project with other users?

In a previous post, I illustrated the Collaborative Modeling mode provided with Obeo Designer 6.

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.

This video illustrates how to proceed.



Of course, for a large project, with important constraints, you will have to configure and administrate your own CDO server.

2) Share a Modeling Project

Once the server has started, you can use it to export a local Modeling Project.

This will copy your local project on the server and make it available for other users. 



This video illustrates how to proceed.



Then, this project can be used in a collaborative mode by any other user who can connect to the CDO server.

3) Work with a Shared Modeling Project

When a modeling project has been shared on a CDO server, other users can work with it in a collaborative mode.

They just have to locally create a new Shared Modeling Project which points to the project hosted on the server.



This video illustrates how to proceed.



This Shared Modeling Project is directly connected to the server and reflects all the changes done by all the other users on the same model.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

On the road again!

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...

 

Enterprise Architecture Morning


The 16th of October, we will be in Paris to discuss about Enterprise Architecture.

The morning is free and will be composed of 4 main parts:

  • Obeo's approach to Enterprise Architecture
  • Case-Study by Choregie, in the Insurance domain
  • TEAP, a collaborative research project with Capgemini and DCNS.
  • SmartEA, the solution proposed by Obeo


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.

EclipseCon Europe 2012


Obeo has been selected for 8 talks: