Welcome to MDDi and thanks for your feedback !!! We really appreciate to
see MetaMatrix being involved in this project. Here are some explanations
related to your comments:
1. The ModelBus will not be Eclipse-only. Any tool (Eclipse-based or not)
may be connected to the ModelBus as far as a dedicated ModelBus adapter is
provided for the tool. Such adapters mainly consist in the precise
description of the services provided by connected tool, including their
parameter description and their communication protocol. An initial set of
adapters is already planned (see the initial contributions list on the
website), others may be released later depending on the community needs
and MDDi development resources. You may find more explanation on the
ModelBus in a previous post (subject: Re: Model Bus - what is it? Xavier
Blanc).
2. Well, you?re right, this sentence will be modified to be more explicit
in the next website update. We have identified in the proposal the two
solutions you mention (let?s call them ?DSL tools? and ?UML profiling?),
and we are convinced that both approaches may be more or less convenient
depending on the situation. As the GMF project proposal already plans to
provide a framework to build ?DSL tools?, the MDDi proposal rather focus
on the alternate approach (?UML profiling?). Though I agree with you on
the fact that ?UML profiling? is never mandatory or even unworkable, I do
think that in some industrial situations this approach is a good way to
save efforts in term of tool development costs, maintenance and training.
Anyway, I don?t try to state that one solution is better than another, in
my opinion the correct answer should be: depends. The real good point is
that the MDDi and GMF proposal target two complementary aspect giving the
community more choices to manage modeling languages and DSL issues.
3. We are considering testing support as a possible feature for MDDi.
However, we plan to focus on the aspects mentioned in the proposal at a
first time. Do you have concrete ideas or existing code that would enable
a support for testing in MDDi?
We appreciate your help in this project and were wondering if you could
tell us more about a possible contribution to MDDi.