[m2m-atl-dev] New ATL adopters

[Martin J Bartlett <jbartle9@xxxxxxx>]

Hello guys.

We're using ATL at CSC - we'll be using it extensively eventually in a new
MDD based product.

Now, in the KINDEST possible voice and with the greatest possible respect
for your technical acheivements with ATL, we, by common accord at CSC, have
to say that the documentation sucks! Sorry for the strong term, but it
really does. If you are open to assitance I offer mine: I am a) a very
competant English technical writer, b) a big fan of what ATL can do (as far
as we have gone with it) and c) living permanently in Paris (and,
consequently, perfectly able to read French and write English like a native
- dont ask me to try the other way round though :-)).

Secondly, a mundane bug report on the latest sources that we are working
from (where should I post this normally): Line 146 of
org.eclipse.m2m.atl.engine.AtlEMFModelHandler reads:

IFile file = ResourcesPlugin.getWorkspace().getRoot().getFile(new
Path(uri.path()));

this is not good, however, when running transforms outside of Eclipse. The
ResourcePlugin is not active in such circumstances, so the call to
getWorkspace results in an IllegalStateException. The call should be
surrounded by guard code. Unfortunately, the only way I can find of
checking if the workspace is valid without throwing an exception is to call

ResourcesPlugin p = ResourcesPlugin.getPlugin();

which at least will show if the plugin itself has been started (which it
won't have been in non-Eclipse environments)

Another (possibly better) approach might be to remove the Eclipse platform
specifics which are not necessary.

Thirdly, exception handling.  Any chance of getting ATL to pass Exceptions
much higher up the call chain rather than reporting everything to the
console at a low level?

Headless operation - We have successfully built some tooling/hacks that
allow the dynamic transformation of incore ecore models - that is we bypass
the file IO veneer that ATL has and go straight to the ASMModel creation
with an existing ecore Resource, and then take the "extent" from the output
ASMModel and go and work with that. Is there work within the ATL project to
do similar - or are we trail blazing? (Note that the ResourcePlugin and
exception issues mentioned above derive from this integrated headless
operation).

Here's hoping that we (and I) can be come very active in helping to develop
ATL.

Martin Bartlett

Senior Technical Consultant
CSC Financial Services SAS
Registered Office: 14 Place de la Coupole, Axe Liberté, 94220 Charenton Le
Pont, France
Registered in France: RCS Créteil B 323 127 332

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