Re: [gmf-dev] About upcoming Eclipse Sirius project

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

Hi, Mickael.
Thanks for your input, the summary is appreciated.

I don't think Generative versus Interpretative is the big difference between GMF Tooling and Sirius.

Adding interpretation modus to GMF Tooling will just be another feature to be added or not, at some suited point in the GMF Tooling roadmap.

We have already shown that the MDA architecture of GMF allowed to target as well the Graphiti Runtime, and it allowed to integrate the work of the people working on SimpleMap, a way to do WYSIWIG graphical editors.

The main difference between GMF Tooling, and the new overlapping projects like Spray or Sirius is that we at GMF Tooling care about a big basis of existing users. Among them is the Papyrus project, which generates graphical editors for UML2.

A lot of the functionality that was added by Obeo Designer to GMF Tooling is now going to be included in GMF Tooling directly, and a lot more will be added by down-porting features from Papyrus to GMF Tooling, and applying new features of GMF Tooling to Papyrus.

There are a lot of things on the GMF Tooling roadmap, and when and how to tackle interpreted diagram editor models will depend on the demand from the user community, of major adoptors and users like the Papyrus project, and of the GMF Tooling sponsor, who has a population of 90 DSLs written in ECore.

The last release of GMF Tooling moved a lot of functionality that was previously in code to QVTO and OCL, including impact analysis for the OCL part. Thus a major step towards interpreted diagram editor models was already done in GMF Tooling. If another prototype for doing it exists in open source, in the form of Sirius, this will only help to speed up adding it to GMF Tooling too.


The main strength of GMF Tooling is that it is a pure open source project, without any dependency on a commercial project. Even the largest user, Papyrus, is a pure open source project, and not a commercial product. The developers of GMF Tooling, and now as well QVTO are recruited among the original developers of the EMF Modeling Frameworks at Borland/Together, and work at good, but local rates in Prague and St. Petersburg, without any other organization in the middle. The sponsorship money flows directly to the developers.

Like this, the GMF Tooling project can quickly replay for more requests from the community or the commercial users. Currently we focus communicating this capabilities to the Swiss financial industry, but we will do broader communication soon.

Hope to see you at Models2013, to finally meet you in person, and dicusss.
Regards, and have a nice week,
Philipp

On 10.06.2013 08:00, Mickael Istria wrote:

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,

--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
My blog - My Tweets

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Philipp W. Kutter
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