| [gmf-dev] About upcoming Eclipse Sirius project |
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Hi all, I had the opportunity to see a presentation about Sirius at EclipseCon France. This project, which used to be a main piece of Obeo Designer, will soon become an Eclipse project under EPL license and will join Luna release train. The goal of Sirius is the same as GMF Tooling: provide efficient tool to create diagram editor relying on GMF Runtime APIs. However, Sirius does not use generation, it interprets an editor model which defines graphical elements, mappings, tools and so on at runtime. Although one could expect some drawbacks in performance, the demo I saw looks as performant as an editor generated by GMF Tooling. However, Obeo folks have admitted that there is a bigger memory footprint with Sirius, but this has never been a blocking point for their use-cases yet, and the presentation showed some very big use-cases. Their non-generative approach has a big advantage: changes on editor model can be done on the fly so while you edit your editor model, you immediatly see how it affects the actual diagram editor (diagram editor listens to change on diagram metamodel and reacts immediatly), this allow way faster iterations with faster feedback since there is no more generation. Also the tooling is more polished and easier to understand than GMF Tooling one. Overall, it makes a Sirius-based editor easier to develop and maintain. In the demo, they developed a concrete simple editor in 4 iterations with nice pictures for nodes and dynamic change on node figure based on some attribute value in less than 20 minutes. I highly encourage everyone interested in GMF Tooling to have a look at Sirius, it has a "wow" effect. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a video: * http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/modeling.sirius/ * http://model-driven-blogging.blogspot.fr/2013/03/introducing-eclipse-sirius.html Cheers, |