Skip to main content

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
[sirius-dev] Coming back from EclipseCon Europe 2016

I'm taking the opportunity of a long airport connection to capture (while it's fresh) and report to you what happened during this week of conference. There was 619 attendees for the whole conference.

Attendees interested in modeling knew about Sirius, the most I met had tried it (or did so during the tutorial) and they all knew what Sirius was about and what problems it fixes.

We had an informal BOF session: discussing with adopters, showing what can be done and we even had a demo of a modeler built with Sirius by the EMF Parlsey team which was very cool!

That's also the first year so many people came to me during EclipseCon just for saying that they love Sirius. Digging further,  what they like the most is:
- First and foremost is the productivity. They could get the result they wanted in very little time.
- Second is the quality of the tooling they get, those many "small" yet important features that their users are discovering when using their own modelers.
- Sirius + Xtext working together is also perceived as a strong asset. BTW I also discussed with the Xtext team and new things are coming in the next version which can notably improve the experience, the serialization for instance is getting an important performance boost...
- This one I did not expect: some had to extend quite a lot the default behavior, regarding layout in particular, and found that it was way easier to do so in Sirius than when they had their own GEF/GMF modeler.  That is an illustration of the fact that we should not forget that java API, even way more complex than specifying in the .odesign editor are still a valid and efficient answer for many users.
- The "seamless upgrade" of the .odesign model is also really appreciated and helped users in moving quicker on the new version. We said it, now they have been experiencing it several times and like it. 

All this feedback was filled with excitement, congrats to the team for such a success ! Some also mentioned the excellent support on the forum or bugzilla. Keep up the good work! 

I also asked about areas to improve and the most common requests were related to the .odesign tooling and getting capabilities to debug the specification. Queries are seen as indeed a powerful mechanism yet something which can get quite hard to get right (even when starting with AQL). The package.Type and package::Type mismatch came up several times during the tutorial leading to non-working queries.

Also some areas in the .odesign editor are still pretty poor regarding the validation (style customization for instance). Some users did not even know about the "validate" action to check a query.  They do "manage" though as you can iterate very quickly with "try something, see if it works, try a new way".  The "problem view" error reporting was not even known.

The discoverability of what you can do is also a problem for many specifiers. It was mentioned that a generic action to create "New.." Then ask the type, then ask where in the .odesign model to put it could help in some cases...
That being said, the focus on the features targeting the end user vs the specifier is appreciated.
A "Create a Viewpoint Specification project from Ecore files" wizard providing default diagrams based on an EClass entry point was also mentioned quite a few times. They have that in Xtext and that's highly appreciated as a means to get started.

On the "end user" side the lack of a proper .aird editor (meaning: useful and declared as an editor in Eclipse) clearly impairs the use of the toolings in perspectives which are not "Modeling".

The new properties view support has been really well received and is important for 90℅ of those users. That's consistent with what we've seen on the Sirius Forum lately. Mélanie and Stéphane gathered more specific feedback on the properties view.

I had quite a few mentions of "Eclipse Sirius on Che" by users and we discussed possible paths that we could take to reach integration of the two technologies. I still have quite a few open questions, but something really nice could be done. Anybody interested in funding a prototype or working on it can contact me.

All in all a lot of positive signs and a great event! Feel free to track bugzillas related to this feedback if you want to get some changes considered for the next release (I'm just too tired and with a connectivity which is too low to do it right now). Next step is SiriusCon on the 15th of November, the future is looking good!


--

Cédric Brun
CTO
+33 2 51 13 51 42
@bruncedric

7 Boulevard Ampère - Carquefou - France
obeo.fr | twitter | linkedin


Back to the top