[gmf-dev] Mickael Istria's mail from 13.9.: CDO/Dawn, EEF, GMF-Tooling

["Philipp W. Kutter" <kutter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Mickael.
Thanks for the great input, an sorry it has not been answered.

I am creating the draft proposal of the project plan now, will commit it shortly and post the main proposed topics here for discussion.

Great.

I am sure, Michael Golubev will start posting the topics soon.

One reason he has not published a lot is that what they work on are topics already discussed, decided and published by Artem, and all the earlier team members, such as using M2M to map from graphical-editor-models to models of the code.

I think some of the topics we should think about improving, according to what we can read on the forum are:
* Integration with CDO/Dawn
* integration with EEF to provide also customization of properties. Not make a strong dependency of GMF-Tooling onto EEF, but making it easier for people to think about using EEF when developing diagrams.

We brought up CDO/Dawn as well, and it is of course planned to do whatever is needed to support the success of CDO/Dawn.

As well, any framework like EEF, or the established way of adding OCL to annotations, as shown by Christian Damus, or the new way of using the new extension points for this shall work together with GMF.

In general, the direction is that the use of GMF together with frameworks that base on the EMF level, such as CDO/Dawn, or EEF, or OCL, or XText2 goes smoothly.

Anything going against it, or any needed change shall be entered as bugzilla. Have you identified any issue regarding the integration with CDO/Dawn or EEF?

Also, technical stuff:
* Make GMF-Tooling models and templates extensible in order to be able to provide new features in models from extension mechanism. (Such as SVG will come with extension for the model + extension for the templates + extensions for the runtime).

Better extensibility is the main topic. Again here, there is started work, comming both from earlier GMF Tooling work, as well as from work done in the MDT UML2 Tooling project where Michael Golubev was the component lead.

Please provide some trust to the people who worked on the GMF Tooling project and related topics for 10+ years now.

Besides coding, the team will provide a library of reusable "Diaglets" that show how to use all the extension mechanisms, and how diagramming elements can be made reusable.

However, it is already clear for me that in order to deliver the new features we need Juno release to be a major one, thus 3.0 instead of 2.x. 

The reason is, we will have to change models significantly, and we will not be able to provide automatic backward compatibility with the models created for 2.4.x 

(we will of course follow the transition procedure from the past of GMF-T and will develop 'Migrate Model' actions to support migration of existing models).

I +1 this proposal. Until then, GMF-Tooling release and versioning was trying to follow the same rythm than GMF-Runtime, but the last monthes clearly show that the project cannot really work like this any longer. Then it would make a lot of sense to start a new 3.x stream with lots of new features.

As mentioned, the main topic is extensibility and reuseability. But I expect as well of a few new features.

The idea is however, that new features can be contributed by the community as "Diaglets" of code, that uses the better extendability and reuseablity of the code.

GMF Tooling shall become a model-case of using EMF technology to create extensible and reusable functionality. Core of this is the ability to extend the most intelligent part of the code, which transforms the model representing the graphical-editor into the models representing the final code. The way to make this extensible is by using a M2M technology, in our case QVTO.

Then the resulting code shall be structured such, that it is easy to customize using the results of the M2M transformation, and that it is easy to reuse.

I hope this answers some questions.

Regards, Philipp