Acceleo - Eclipse

In parallel with my computing activity, I decided to open a new blog about filmmaking, to share my experiences in this domain... I will talk about independent filmmaking, DSLR cinema, new amazing DSLR techniques, film production processes, directing ... [More] , cinematography... and how the openness and the innovation of free software spirit can also improve all that stuff... Here is the link... See you later on this blog or on the other one... [Less]

In parallel with my computing activity, I decided to open a new blog about filmmaking, to share my experiences in this domain... I will talk about independent filmmaking, DSLR cinema, new amazing DSLR techniques, film production processes, directing ... [More] , cinematography... and how the openness and the innovation of free software spirit can also improve all that stuff...Here is the link... See you later on this blog or on the other one... [Less]

At Obeo we are currently working hard for the finishing of the next version of our eclipse based modeling studio named Obeo Designer.Obeo Designer 5.0 embeds our latest modeling technologies.Acceleo 3.0.2Acceleo is a text generation tool. If you ... [More] think that code generation sucks due to its lack of tooling, then you should probably try Acceleo. Its offers much more than a complete eclipse editor with syntactic coloration, code completion and quick fixes. For instance it provides an integrated debugger : Acceleo debuggerAcceleo is a technology that has been recognized as innovative and effective.Obeo Traceability 2.0Obeo Traceability is a tool to manage the synchronization between your models and the generated text. For each model element, you are able to know which text section have been generated and navigate between text and model. If you decide to modify the generated text, Obeo Traceability will automatically indicates it, and offers you the choice mark the section as not generated or to update model and generator.Before modification on the left and after on the rightObeo Traceability provide these features with a user interface completely integrated to Eclipse.Viewpoint 5.2Viewpoint allows one to create easily graphical editors. Easily ? For each editor you simply define mappings between model elements and graphical styles along with tools which describe modifications to make on model in response to user actions. Graphical editors ? you could specify diagrams, tables and trees and the API allows you to define your own kind of editors.See example editors below made with Viewpoint. Diagram editorTable editor [Less]

Last Friday, I was at Toulouse for the first edition of the Topcased Days. During this conference, I had the opportunity to realize a presentation of Acceleo 3. This was a huge success and this was a great occasion to meet lots of Acceleo users. I ... [More] had a great time seeing presentations from Acceleo users and watching how they are using Acceleo to generate code for satellites, planes etc. The organization was great and it was both very friendly and professional. I will put the videos of my presentation online soon for those who couldn’t be there and you’ll be able to find a link to this presentation on the Acceleo wiki. Speaking of the Acceleo wiki, as Cédric mentioned before, it is making a fresh start with more content and an improved navigation. Now the wiki will take a main place in the Acceleo community, and you will find in one place everything needed to use Acceleo. You will also be able to find a table of the features available in Acceleo 3 and the new things that we will work on for the next release, including a wishlist for those who want to contribute to Acceleo. Some of those subjects may be used for the upcoming Google Summer of Code. This wiki will be updated with links to videos, tutorials, and community content. [Less]

One- two-three, one-two-three.. 2011 begins ... one-two-three..Is that waltz ? Clearly 2011 is starting with another kind of tempo: a fast and dynamic one !Fred Madiot just joined Obeo, you probably already met him at an Eclipse Conference and know ... [More] him through the Eclipse Modisco project. He is joining us to develop the business through the Obeo Designer and Obeo Agility offers, we're quite excited about this and happy to get him on board !Speaking about getting on board , we still have room for internships, if you're interested in working on innovative open-source projects focused on modeling and app modernizations, feel free to contact us !Now on to the 2011 subjects: as french we like to cook, here is a taste of what is going on :You already know we're involved in many Eclipse projects, 2011 will see the launch of a new project named Intent [proposal] within the on-vitamin project Mylyn. This project is transforming the tedious and boring task of documenting software into a useful and easy process. You can have more information looking at the [Intent EclipseCon Talk], the [Wiki] (we're filling it up), [blog post fromAlex] or simply asking in the [Eclipse Forum].The Acceleo Team is working restlessly on enhancing the tooling (which is already awesome by the way). The wiki has been reworked, my favorite page is the [Features Matrix] (credits to eGit release reviews docuware) which will give you a nice overview of what is available and how. If there is one page to look at, it's this one !You saw [EEF in action] lately, the 0.9.0 is in the process of being released (currently in RC), this version will be the reference build for the upcoming Obeo Designer 5.0 ! If you're monitoring git in Eclipse, you might have seen the general project rush on this new infrastructure ! EMF Compare successfully did the move, you can now easily [fork it] and experiment at will ![Patrick] also joined the team and actively worked on getting a compare release which includes the MPatch support I blogged about [lately].Speaking about compare you can expect user interface enhancements, merge stabilization and dedicated UML support for this year. Coming soon in another blog post !As I said : exciting times and dynamic tempo ! [Less]

Since two years, I am working for the IMOFIS R&D project. The last year, we have developed a graphical modeler for safety concerns. This modeler is based on the EN 50126 and ISO 26262 norms.The key idea of this work is to provide a graphical ... [More] safety viewpoint for system engineering. The system is design with the SysML language. Safety engineers describe their analysis with the safety viewpoint. p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } The result is pretty cool ! In the next figure I described that the SysML “F2” operation of the SysML Block “CBTC” (Communication Based Train Control) is referenced by a barrier to prevent a derailment (the accident) in case of an excessive speed (the hazard).In this work, we use several model-driven technologies to build our software :The Eclipse Modeling Framework to describe the safety metamodelThe Extended Editing Framework to generate both property views and wizardsThe Obeo Designer viewpoint-based studio to create graphical views  without any manual codeThe GenDoc2 Topcased technology to generate documentations. This technology is based on the Acceleo model-driven code generation.I will present this work on the Topcased Day conference in february !  In the meantime, you can look for screenshots, videos and publications on the Obeo network !  [Less]

We've recently had a good number of people asking for comparisons between Acceleo 2 and its new major version Acceleo 3. Some people also wondered how Acceleo ranked compared to the other trendy code generation tool, Xpand. The three have the same ... [More] goal : generating text from models, let's take a closer look at their respective performances.With the migration capabilities we have between Acceleo 2 and Acceleo 3, comparing those two has proven rather easy; comparing them with Xpand has been a little more trouble for me as I am not familiar to this tool. I still attained a result I believe to be interesting.I didn't make in-depth comparisons between the tooling of each of these three tools, focusing on the generation performance only. GUI comparison may come later, when I have the courage :).What I did compare was the generation performance for a given set of generation templates that I ported to all three of the technologies. The result is that all three tools (Acceleo 2, Acceleo 3 and Xpand 1.0.1) generate the very same java code, whitespaces excepted.Each of the times outlined below is the average of three runs on the same machine :- Intel Core 2 Duo 64 bits- Dual core, 2GHz by core- 4 Go RAM- Windows seven 64bitsThe version of Java installed on this machine was Java SE 1.5.0_22 64bits.The Eclipse platform version was Eclipse Helios 3.6.1 (64 bits still). Each tool was installed within its own Eclipse with only its dependencies and the dependencies of the tests.I've run two distinct use cases for this benchmarking :- "Small" corresponding to the generation with a small model as input. I used UML.genmodel for this, which in turn links to UML.ecore, Ecore.ecore and Ecore.genmodel. When counting the content of the two main models used by this transformation, UML.genmodel and UML.ecore (just a basic count of eAllContents), I get a total of 14 420 elements.- "Medium" corresponding to the generation of medium models as input. For this, I generated a metamodel with a fixed number of classes, enumerations and datatypes, then the corresponding genmodel. Like above, a basic count of the model content yields a total of 50 944 elements.As far as generated files go, the "small" use case generates 217 java classes for a total of 200 921 lines of code. The "medium" use case generates 1 206 java files for a total of 838 273 lines of code.All measures have been taken "at worst", launching the generation in a new Eclipse runtime (thus, nothing in cache, no plugin loaded yet). The times given here are in seconds, and they correspond to the average of three runs. One measure comprises the time to load the model, the time to evaluate the generation and the time to serialize the result.Without further ado, here are the figures : Acceleo 2 Acceleo 3 Xpand Small 50 s 10 s 25 s Medium 215 s 25 s 212 s Being an Acceleo developper myself, I can only be pleased by these results ... Even though the test might be seend as biased as a result :p. All of the files needed to replay these can be downloaded from here. On that matter, as I am not familiar with Xpand, please don't hesitate to optimize the templates if at all possible (though the Acceleo 3 templates themselves don't use the latest evolutions of Acceleo 3.1). [Less]

Last month, Julien, from the INRIA Aoste team, has presented the RT-Simex project to the FSE conference (http://fse18.cse.wustl.edu/). The slides are available here : http://www.slideshare.net/fthomasfr/fsertsimex.

If I want to describe cinematic between my webapp, which representation is the easiest to understand :this one:or this one :At Eclipse Summit Europe 2010, I do a talk to explain how Modeling can be useful to design JavaEE based applications: how to ... [More] create some textual and graphical DSL for each layers of my webapp, how to create Acceleo based code generators for Hibernate, Struts, Spring and others frameworks, how to integrate everything in an Entreprise Architecture with a Togaf based designer. Some flash demos are available to see the resulted workbench.And here are my slides:Eclipse Modeling for WTP [Less]

If I want to describe cinematic between my webapp, which representation is the easiest to understand :this one:or this one :At Eclipse Summit Europe 2010, I do a talk to explain how Modeling can be useful to design JavaEE based applications:how to ... [More] create some textual and graphical DSL for each layers of my webapp,how to create Acceleo based code generators for Hibernate, Struts, Spring and others frameworks,how to integrate everything in an Entreprise Architecture with a Togaf based designer.Some flash demos are available to see the resulted workbench.And here are my slides:Eclipse Modeling for WTP [Less]