Merks' Meanderings

Modeling Daze to Come

2012-01-10T07:00:00.011-05:00

My transition to Germany is nearing completion. I now have a three year visa to stay in Germany and I'm registered as living in Berlin. Amazingly the visa was acquired with roughly eight hours of time investment, including the four hour wait for the appointment, along with zero euros of financial investment. The best things in life are free.

The German process stands in sharp contrast to the Canadian process we followed for Frank. That cost many thousands of dollars and took the better part of a year. All I need now is a German tax number and a German bank account and I'll be ready for business in 2012. Speaking of business, there's a lot going on! Jonas recently blogged about the Eclipse Modeling Symposium scheduled for EclipseCon. If you'd like an opportunity to showcase Really Cool Things,™ please send in your proposal so that Jonas and I can find an appropriate slot for your facet.

The OMG is holding an Eclipse Symposium as well. It will be held the day before EclipseCon starts, i.e., Sunday, March 25th, 2012. It will focus on Eclipse technologies that implement and support OMG specifications. Ed Willink is helping organize it. If you're interested, I suggest you contact him at ed at willink dot me dot uk . You can also register just to attend. I'm looking forward to seeing the juxtaposition of the old and the new.

As you may have noticed, you simply can't have too many Modeling Days, so of course there will be another modeling day at JAX this year. Sven, Eike, and I are organizing it. If you'd like to get involved, please send your proposal to ed dot merks at gmail dot com. I expect I'll be able to understand more of the German content this year than I did last year. Maybe I'll even have plodded along far enough to speak some broken German by then.

To further round off an already well rounded event schedule, there's an Eclipse Day in Florence on May 4th. Can you think of a lovelier place to hold a Eclipse event? We're really looking forward to having a peek at part of the community we've seen less frequently.

At this point you might be wondering about deadlines for submissions. All I can say is don't ask about deadlines! Do it now. There's no time like the present. Time waits for no one, and most especially not for you. If you have time, and you expect to be in Berlin, Eike and I will be at the Eclipse User Group Stammtisch on January 31st.

Making the Move to Germany

2011-11-23T01:53:00.008-05:00

I haven't blogged for a quite a while, not for lack of content, but rather for lack of time. So much as happened in the past months! In August we had visitors from Germany. We took them to see Pacific Rim National Park, one of the most beautiful places on earth.

During this time we also started making plans for an extended stay in Germany, which, as you know, is the home of Really Cool Things.™ My ThinkPad was very old and totally tired, so I finally cracked open my wallet and bought a new Dell Precision M4600; I must have a keyboard with an ultranav. My new baby is fully loaded to the hilt with every desirable feature, including 16GB of 16MHz memory, two SSD drives, an i7-2920XM Quad Core, and more. It sure was a lot of work to get it set up, but I love it.

We've been in Germany since October 7th. Berlin is our home base. And of course we brought the girlies along! Since our arrival, I've been busier than ever with visits to itemis headquarters in Lünen, the Xtext guys in Kiel, EclipseCon Europe in Ludswigburg, as well as demo camps in Bonn and Dresden. We've even had a chance to go sightseeing in Rügen.

Just this past weekend I went to a friend's concert at Berliner Dom! I captured the experience with my brand new Nikon Coolpix S9100 with 18x wide optical zoom.

This week there's a stammtisch in Berlin on Thursday and next week Eike and I present at an itemis event in Bonn on Tuesday. Maybe we'll see you at one of those events! Later next week, Eike and I host an itemis training session in Oldenburg; yet another place I've never been. I'm pretty sure I've seen more of Germany in the past weeks than most Germans have seen in the past years.

It's quite clear now that Germany is the cool place to be for us to be, so we're making long term plans to stay here. It's kind of scary, but oh so exciting too. My German comprehension improves a little bit every day though my speaking abilities lag far behind, for lack of trying I'm told. In any case, I now have a very nice home office that includes a Dell UltraSharp U3011 monitor; I kiss it every morning because I love it so much.

Life is definitely very cool and exciting. I'll have to blog more often now that things are finally settling down. Xcore too is progressing well; stay tuned...

Xcore: Coolness Reborn

2011-08-08T21:56:00.007-05:00

The quest to Kiel has proven enlightening beyond expectation. Last week, as I approached the sanctuary of the Xtext team, sun glinting from the facade, I knew deep down that I was headed for the right place.

Xtext is the coolest of the cool projects at Eclipse today, and that's tough competition! Three of its four custodians, Sven, Sebastian, and Moritz, were there that Monday morning. We discussed the coolest things we could collectively conceive: Xcore, progeny of Ecore and Xbase. We decided to begin this new endeavor using a repository at github so we could immediately begin working as a team. (Of course we'll host this at Eclipse after we migrate EMF itself to Git.) Time flew yet much progress was made before the sun set on a great week.

We found time to write a proposal for a session at EclipseCon Europe 2011. If ever there was a Really Cool Thing,™ this definitely is it! Before I knew, I was back on a speeding plane, admiring the majesty that is Super Natural British Columbia.

I got home just in time for the final display of Vancouver's Celebration of Light. I was definitely in the mood to celebrate!

I'm extremely happy to have embarked on this cool quest. I look forward to excellent progress in the weeks to come. That vast desert of uncool is already fading from memory. To whet your appetite, here's how the Xcore model for the standard Library example looks:

This isn't just a pretty picture, we have a great deal that is working already! Don't just take my word for it, open source is a glass house; stay tuned. Of course all design decisions are subject to change. We look forward to feedback from the community.

The Quest for Coolness

2011-07-29T08:45:00.000-05:00

As you know from my previous blog, I've been thinking a great deal about "Really Cool Things."™ In fact, not only have I been thinking, I've taken action: I have embarked on a great quest. While wandering the vast desert of uncoolness, with nothing of interest as far as the eye could see, I thought I heard a voice as my eyes were drawn to a sparkle in the distant horizon. Could it be the enlightenment that I seek? The voice compelled me to go forth: "That which you seek is in Kiel," it whispered quietly. Meanwhile, my faithful companion found coolness in a stick.

Being somewhat impulsive, I immediately booked a flight to Germany. It leaves this coming Saturday and arrives on Sunday. From there my quest will continue; I think I'll start fasting. I know not what I'll find, never having been to Kiel, but I am confident that I'll find that which I seek: "Really Cool Things."™

All Cool Things

2011-06-26T12:42:00.007-05:00

With Indigo behind me and Juno in the distant horizon, it's time to chart a new course. It was with great interest that I read Mile's inspirational and timely blog about Indolent Programming. I immediately recognized that I definitely prefer to work on Really Cool Things. Moreover, like a bolt of lightning, I had a startling revelation: providing service and support for a ten year old framework like EMF is totally, absolutely uncool. Granted it was definitely cool to create and popularize EMF and most certainly it's great for the uncounted clients relying heavily on EMF that it be well supported, but one salient fact stands stark: service and support is at the far end of the coolness spectrum. As a result of this awakening, I nurtured my inner Teflon Programmer, and embarked on a renewed quest for coolness. Who will support EMF in my stead, you might ask. Ms. Else of course!

She's the ultimate goat, to use Mile's enlightened terminology. She actually enjoys eating her own dog food. Not only that, if you throw her the occasional bone, she's simply beside herself. This will help free up much of my time. She'll be well qualified to hit some of my simple short cut keys. For example, the first answer to any newsgroup question will be, "Did you consult with your best friend, the debugger? She's able to answer questions far faster than me." Of course Else too has a backup, Ms. Ruby!

What will I do with my new found freedom? That's for me to know and for you to find out. The only thing I'll reveal is that at this moment, number one on my list is Eclipse Demo Camp Vancouver. See you there or be uncool; the choice is always yours.

So Much to Do, So Little Time

2011-06-12T23:16:00.000-05:00

It's been ages since last I blogged. Where does all the time go? EclipseCon came and went in a whirlwind of activity. There wasn't nearly as much modeling content as in previous years and I know more than a few folks were frustrated that I rejected their talks. I didn't bother explaining that this year's selection process reduced me to tears; sometimes it's best to just clam up.

You'll probably be surprised to learn that I actually spent quite a bit of time in my evil secret lair doing cool technical work in recent months. EMF's RESTful persistence framework is heavily focused on stream-based I/O, but sometimes streams are just not what you really need. To enable greater flexibility, we've added two new interfaces to URIConverter: Loadable and Saveable. These make it easy to add a URIHandler that creates facades rather than real streams and via those facades persists a resource's contents in some arbitrary manner, i.e., in a database or some other type of structured repository. If you're interested in details about how to exploit these two new pillars, Byan Hunt blogged about MongoDB integration for EMF not so long ago.

As part of EMF's persistence flexibility enhancements, I vamped up the existing resource implementations as well. Of course they needed to detect the new stream facades in order to delegate appropriately, but more to the point, it's now also possible with a single resource implementation, i.e., XMIResourceImpl, to produce or consume binary using XMLResource.OPTION_BINARY, XML using XMIResource.OPTION_SUPPRESS_XMI, and of course XMI as usual. It's been a well hidden secret up to now, much like the new ODA support Kenn Hussey implemented!

The coolest new feature though is the improved ability to record a set of changes being made to a model and from that efficiently produce a change description that can be sent elsewhere and applied to replicate those changes. It's ironic that a feature so easy to describe is so deceptively difficult to implement. As part of its Change model EMF has long supported a ChangeRecorder that produces a ChangeDescription for this purpose. The problem is that it describes how to go from the current state back to the original state, i.e., it's a reverse delta. It's possible to call applyAndReverse to produce a forward delta, but that modifies the state of the model, i.e. , it's like undo. Of course it's also possible to call applyAndReverse as second time to redo the changes, but clearly that's not very efficient nor desirable when there's a user interface updating in response to all the changes. To address that problem, we've implemented copyAndReverse so that we can produce a serializeable forward delta without changing the state of the model itself. You might want to try it out and help stamp out any remaining bugs.

At the beginning of May I traveled to Germany for JAX and met up with a bunch of my friends for an Eclipse modeling day. The presentations and discussions were in German, so that was very tiring! Can you name all the Eclipse committers in this picture?

As part of the JAX trip to Europe, I spent some time in the Netherlands; I was born in Rijswijk and I took my mother long to visit with her family there while Frank and I stayed in Den Haag and then Amsterdam. I've never been to Amsterdam before and we happened to be there for Koninginnedag. That was quite amazing. No one can pack more boats on a small canal than the Dutch! The fact that their raft was being pushed under by the crowding boats didn't bother these guys one bit.

Not long after getting back from that, it was time for CodeGen 2011 in Cambridge where I did a keynote on the last day. That was a very interesting conference. I met lots of new people. I hope I'll be able to attend again next year. Mark Dalgarno, the conference organizer, did a great job. He even included a very memorably outing to experience punting on the Cambridge waterways.

Since then, like so many of you, I've been caught up in the final frenzied daze of Indigo. With that almost behind me, I am looking forward to a trip to Raleigh, North Carolina Monday for the Eclipse Board meeting. Speaking of which, the foundation is proposing some updates to the Eclipse Bylaws, so the committer representatives took the opportunity to propose a change to how we are elected. In particular, we looking to deliver on the one committer one vote principle. We're quite pleased about that and hope you are too.

The Universe is Unfair

2011-03-08T18:03:00.007-05:00

Fairness is a highly subjective thing. It's not simply about everyone being treated equal, it's about everyone being treated in a way that's proportional to need, merit, or some combination of the two. The universe is objectively blind to need and merit. It rains fortune and misfortune on the guilty and the innocent with equal abandon. Given that the universe is unfair, we must intervene to rectify the situation and be prepared that when we do, it will be, as Dave points out, contentious.

So it is with divvying out the Friends of Eclipse funds. Scott suggests we give up. Just kidding; I'm distorting his words by taking them out of context. What's life without a bit of humor? He actually suggests we give up centralized control. Fortunately he doesn't mean we should have a vote each and every time. We all know how contentious voting can be and how easily one can stack the vote with all your best friends. It's more likely to resemble a popularity contest than anything else.

Concretely, in 339239, Scott suggests that the individuals donating the money should make the decision. I'm not completely sure what this would entail. I think the suggestion is that the donor delegates the spending decision to a specific project's leadership, sort of like ear marking it, perhaps via a huge drop-down list of all projects. That certainly sounds very fair, at least to the donor.

Let's consider though just for a moment if donor earmarking is likely to be fair in the grand scheme of things. I hope the Aardvark project, being early in the list of choices, doesn't get most of the donations! I hope projects with poor documentation, builds, and testing get some money to help fix that. I hope projects that are used in the many other projects, but aren't apparent in the user interface, get lots of donations. In fact, I hope it's not just a few sexy projects that get the lion's share of the money. Simply put, I hope the donors will be fair. I doubt it though. I fear it will just be a case of the rich getting richer. Personally, I'd rather have people I trust to do what's fair making the decisions.

To be Fair and Balanced, That is the Question

2011-03-06T18:02:00.005-05:00

As you may or may not be aware, your committer representatives are responsible for the allocation of the Friends of Eclipse fund. There's not a lot of money and we'd like to use it in a way that promotes our community. A few people have proposed ideas. Some were accepted and some were not. We'd like to think our decision making process was fair and balanced, but that's been called into question, particularly with regard to a request for release engineering support for ECF. As a group, all the people currently running to be a committer representative agreed that using the community's limited funding to scratch the admittedly nasty itch of one specific project isn't appropriate.

To me, that seems fair and balanced, but apparently some are inclined to see it differently. Simply put, we are doing damage to small projects like ECF by saying no, we have wasted the valuable time they spent asking for money, and we generally don't represent the interests of the community. The list of things we're doing poorly is long and we're clearly bad people. It's ironic to me how often those most skilled at dishing out critique---calling Ekke an ignorant hack being another good example---are the very same ones so easily offended by another's poor choice of words. I need to keep an open mind though, so if others feel we've misjudged in our decisions, please let us know your thoughts.

Procrastination

2011-03-01T18:34:00.014-05:00

Never put off until tomorrow what you can forget about forever. After all, some problems will just go away on their own if you ignore them long enough, right?

I've been so busy these past months that a great many things have slipped through the cracks. I'm beginning to think there are more cracks than solid ground. Last I blogged I'd just traveled to Zurich for Eclipse Enterprise Modeling Day as well as to Ludwigsburg for Eclipse Summit Europe and I was living in Maple Ridge. Three months later, I'm planning a trip to Zurich for a Modeling Workshop---don't procrastinate, register immediately or miss your opportunity---as well as a trip to Santa Clara for yet another fun-filled, action-packed EclipseCon and I'm living in amazing downtown Vancouver; the Tasktop office just a five minute walk away. What happened to the house plans? A word to the wise: if you think we software engineers have trouble staying on schedule and within budget, the North American construction industry makes our industry look like a well-oiled machine. I'd rather step on a stone fish than try to design and build my own house again; it would a much quicker and far less painful death.

Don't forget, it's election time again for the Committer Representatives of the Eclipse Board of Directors. I thought fierce mudslinging might ensue while I was off gallivanting around the far east, but apparently it's turning out to be another tame campaign. While all the candidates are very good, and obviously very nice, I'm clearly by far the best because I have the prettiest underwater photographs.

Okay, that's not terribly relevant. But I do have a proven track record when it comes to braving shark-infested waters.

That's an essential skill to be sure! If you plan to vote, you have until March 11th to procrastinate.

Modeling in Europe

2010-11-08T03:15:00.006-05:00

I've been in Europe since October 27th. The trip started with a visit to Zurich to attend the Eclipse Enterprise Modeling Day hosted by UBS. It was very well organized and a great success! This was my first visit to Zurich and I was fortunate to have time for sightseeing with Frank before heading off to Ludwigsburg on October 31st. Zurich is a fantastically beautiful city!

The day before Eclipse Summit Europe, was the face-to-face Eclipse Board of Directors meeting, so the week was off to an interesting start. I was still organizing the content for the Modeling Symposium the following day. Agile preparation I like to call it though some might use the word procrastination.

I think the symposium was a great success. It was a chance for a large number of presenters to demonstrate their favorite technology in action and gave the attendees a diverse overview of many topics they might not learn about otherwise. Each presenter was kind enough to write a brief abstract, which I've included in this blog.

Semi-automated Model Transformations with Mitra and GEF3D

In OMG's "MDA Guide," model transformations are described to "be done manually, with computer assistance, or automatically." Research generally focuses on automated transformations. However, fully automated transformations can not always be applied. In this mini talk, we have a closer look at computer-assisted transformations (CATs), a language for programming them (Mitra) and, as CATs require user interactions, a 3D user interface based on GEF3D. As a result, model elements can simply be dragged from one model to another model, and when dropped these elements are automatically transformed. We demonstrate CATs by means of Jacobson's robustness analysis (known from the Rational Unified Process) and a tool for adding markers to arbitrary Ecore-based models.

Jens von Pilgrim mentioned that modeling without diagrams is like Tour de France without mountains: sure you can do it, and it's maybe even easier, but it takes out all the fun. He shows how he can drag from one diagram type to another, i.e., to transform a use case diagram into a class diagram.

Advanced Features for Migrating Models with COPE

When an Ecore model evolves, existing instances may need to be migrated. To automate the migration of these instances, COPE records the instance migration together with the Ecore model evolution in an explicit history model. The history model specifies the sequence of coupled operations that have been performed. A coupled operation encapsulates both Ecore model evolution and instance migration. Instance migration can be further automated by reusing recurring coupled operations. In this demo, we show the more advanced features of COPE to inspect and refactor the history model as well as to reverse engineer it from two versions of an Ecore model.

Markus Herrmannsdörfer demonstrated how he can use the information for transforming one Ecore model to another into a script that can transform an instance of the first model into an instance of a second model.

Modeling Eclipse Plug-in Artifacts

An Eclipse plug-in is a complex component based on heterogeneous artifacts, e.g., source code, manifest, XML files, properties files, and so on. We will demonstrate how EMF can be used to produce a homogeneous representation of these artifacts and provide a comprehensive model of an existing plug-in. We will illustrate how this model can be used to check development rules or refactor plug-ins.

It was cool to see Frédéric Madiot demonstrate how every last detailed aspect of an Eclipse plug-in is represented as Ecore-based model! He then proceeded to show all the things one can do with this information, e.g., implementing additional quality checks such as the need (for the Eclipse release process) for there to be an about.html file, as well transforming a plug-in from being Eclipse 3.x-based to e4-based.

Only One Click to an EMF Application

We will demonstrate how to develop an example application with the EMF Client Platform and EMFStore. A developer only needs to define an Ecore model for the application´s entities. Based on the EMF Client Platform this already defines a basic User Interface for editing. EMFStore allows storing and distributing the instances of the model. Everything just with the click of a button, that is launching an Eclipse instance with the model plug-in.

Jonas Helming and Maximilian Koegel did three quick demos. The first showed how one can rapidly prototype model designs and test their capabilities with a high-quality editor, i.e., one with forms for editing properties. The next showed the CVS-like ability of their model repository. And finally they showed how they can integrate their repository-approach with SVN.

The CDO Model Repository – Being Connected and Unconnected

In addition to the traditional connected mode, the Helios version of CDO comes with a sophisticated offline mode that has been inspired by distributed versioning systems like Git and is almost transparent for end user applications. If you feel uncomfortable with replicating the entire history of all branches of your master repository you may be interested in this demo. We’ll present the brand new offline workspace facility, which provides you with a more CVS/SVN-like workflow: checkout, update, commit. In combination with our new EFS implementation you can seamlessly integrate your CDO-managed object graphs with any existing Eclipse technology that is based on IFiles, while still being able to access the underlying object graphs.

One of the coolest things Eike Stepper shows is the integration with the Eclipse File System where the repository contents are surfaced as IResources.

Papyrus in Action

We will introduce the Papyrus team during the session, and we will then present the MDT Papyrus project itself. The talk will focus on the UML2 abilities of the tool, full compliance towards UML2 specification, and Domain Specific Modeling Language development facilities using UML2 profiles. We will also demonstrate the various possibilities of tool customization and finally we will present the road map for the next releases.

Remi Schnekenburger and Patrick Tessier showed some of the Papyrus capabilities, such as customizing the diagrams based on stereotype application.

Acceleo on e4

During this presentation, you will see a prototype of the modeling project Acceleo on the e4 platform. That presentation will also give you the opportunity to hear the feedback of this experimental transition to e4 with its advantages and drawbacks.

Stephane Begaudeau showed some of Acceleo's nice integration features, such as its own perspective with views that show things like all the objects accessed when generating a particular artifact; an important traceability feature.

Reconciling Multiple Representations for BPMN 2.0.

The new BPMN 2.0 standard provides a good basis for interoperability between Process Modeling tools and engines from different vendors. An EMF metamodel allows one to read and write standard compliant files and offers a good API for all kinds of tools. Such a metamodel was committed to Eclipse MDT project. However it was not as simple to create as you might have thought: Unfortunately OMG defines both, a CMOF metamodel and an XML Schema, resulting in two official file formats that such an implementation must consider. Fortunately EMF provides a solution for almost everything. I’ll demo how you can merge the two sources, the EMF tricks that were used, and how finally the BPMN implementation works.

Reiner Hille-Doering talked about the incompatibilities between CMOF, with multi-inheritance and typed references verses XML Schema which single inheritance and untyped reference. The difference between these two ways of defining the model needs to be reconciled to produce a single model capable of reading and writing the exchange format implied by each definition. Because it's a large model, he defined an automated way of merging the two to produce a single result annotated with extended metadata.

Dynamic Domain Models for JUnit using EMF, redView and Xtext

Implementing unit tests for business applications means running the same test classes again and again with different inputs and expected outputs. This session should demo, how EMF, redView and Xtext can be used to create reusable test instances which can be configured by dynamic domain models.

Xtext defines the test case specific domain model
redView renders and binds a matching ui at runtime
EMF stores the information in a key-value-map

Florian Pirchner showed how they can use model changes to dynamically update JDT's AST to reflect those changes.

Bonita Open Solution: Leveraging Modeling Power for Customization

We will see how the BonitaSoft team leveraged power of Modeling to turn a simple RCP-based modeler into a highly customized and user-friendly application. I will talk about some GMF-based customization in Bonita Open Solution Studio, and show how this customization is done with repeatable code generation to ensure agility and maintainability.

Aurelien Pupier showed two of their GMF-based editors. Their editors have nice contextual palette that make creating models very easy. They've done a good job making a stylish application.

Typesystems for Xtext Languages

Ever wondered about how to efficiently write the constraints for checking the correctness of non-trivial typing rules in Xtext languages? This short talk introduces the Xtext Typesystem framework which supports the declarative definition of a wide range of typing rules for Xtext languages. I will show a few slides to explain the background and how it works, and then I'll demo how to integrate a typesystem with an actual Xtext language editor.

Markus Völter showed a grammar for a simple expression language and proceeded to demonstrate how a simple type system can be constructed from that. E.g., define the types of the literals (i.e., of the leaf expressions) and then the rules for deriving the type of composite expressions.

Modeling Meets JDT: Leverage Java Types in Your Models

A tight integration with the Java Types and the Java Development Tools (JDT) is a sweet spot especially, but not only, for textual modeling. That's why we developed a lightweight EMF representation of the Java VM types, their operations, and fields as part of the Xtext framework. In this short demo I'll show how we used the abstractions of EMF and the power of dependency injection by means of Google Guice to allow a seamless integration of modeling components with Java VM types. Especially interesting is the dedicated EMF resource implementation that allows clients to work transparently with the Java reflection layer or the available information from a JDT based Eclipse Java project. Furthermore, I'll give a short demo on how the Modeling Workflow Engine (MWE) leverages this feature to provide a highly extensible configuration language including advanced tool support for users.

Sebastian Zarnekow started with a simple DSL to show how, with the use of the JVM type model, it's possible to refer to Java classes. It seamless derives its information either from JDT or via Java reflection, depending on your environment context. Very cool and powerful stuff.

Xdoc - When Writing Documentation is Fun

Xtext comes with extensive documentation published as Eclipse Help, as HTML on our website as well as PDF for printing and offline reading. The documentation is written in Xdoc, a markup language tailored for the purpose of writing documentation for Eclipse projects. This is a short demo of Xdoc and its editing features.

One of the things Sven Efftinge requested is for folks to post information on 328477 about their use of Xtext. He then proceeded to demonstrate the capabilities of Xdoc, a DSL similar to wiki and TeX for writing documentation, with a simple example document.

Diagram views of Xtext Grammars (5 minutes)

The Xtext Syntax View visualizes the syntax of your Xtext language in a railroad diagram. It helps to analyze, debug, and document your Xtext based languages.

Jan Köhnlein's very quick demonstration of his railroad diagram pet project was very cool, so much so that I neglected to get his picture! So I took his snapshot during the beer and pretzel reception right after.

Eclipse Modeling Platform

The Eclipse Modeling Platform (EMP) is an industrial quality integrated software platform to enable complete chains of model-centric tools in organizations focused on model driven development. The requirements for EMP are being set by some of the largest companies using model driven development. EMP will be developed as an Eclipse Industry Working Group supporting a collection of open source projects and encouraging a commercial ecosystem of value-added tools and services. The platform will be based on existing Eclipse modeling technologies but focus on better integration, quality, scalability and usability for modeling professionals.

This talk will give an insight into what is being done in the Modeling Platform Industry Working Group (MPIWG) and who is collaborating in this forum. It will also reflect the relation of the EMP to the existing Eclipse modeling projects and explain why these are promising days for getting this started.

Stephan Eberle gave much the same talk as he did a the Eclipse Modeling Day in Zurich last week.

The rest of the conference, as expected, was fantastic as well. I didn't get to attend all the talks I would have liked to attend, but face-to-face time is one of the primary reasons for traveling to these types of events, so it often takes priority. As with all good things, it came to an end all too quickly.

Friday November 5th, the day after the conference, was a face-to-face meeting of the Modeling Platform Industrial Working Group. It was held at the conference center. Stephan Eberle and Martin Mandischer have been doing a fantastic job gathering requirements, analyzing the gaps that need attention, and outlining a plan for making it happen. Things are progressing well.

No trip to Germany is complete without a stop in Berlin, so that's where I headed Friday night to meet up with Frank, who had been there all that week. We even had a chance to visit Dresden on Sunday. Neither pictures nor words can do that city justice!

Today is our last full day in Germany before heading home to Vancouver tomorrow. It's been a great trip and I'm sure we'll be back soon.

Eclipse Modeling: A Smith for the Cloud

2010-10-04T08:13:00.005-05:00

Google Web Toolkit is cool. In combination with App Engine and Google Plugin for Eclipse, it facilitates the rapid development of applications that run in the cloud. It exploits a familiar language, i.e., Java, as well as familiar tools, i.e., Eclipse's Java Development Tools. As such, you can reuse a great deal of existing expertise. There's even a project wizard to get you up and running quickly.

Unfortunately, Google Plugin’s project wizard produces merely a "hello world" type application, so there remains a great deal to learn before you can do anything truly interesting following best practices. Now, where Google Plugin’s tools trail off, EMF's tools kick in. Starting with a simple description of your data structures, you can generate a fully functional application focused specifically on your domain of interest. My demo at Google’s Eclipse Day last month showed this in action. Now, with the help of my colleagues at Cloudsmith, we have everything nicely packaged up so you can easily try it at home. It’s all documented in the EMF for GWT wiki. Prepare to soar into the clouds.

Of course those of you familiar with Eclipse modeling know that EMF produces simple natural APIs of hand written quality in which complex relationships are simply expressed. But those of you more familiar with GWT and App Engine, and with technologies like Roo, will likely expect to be dealing with Data Transfer Objects that describe denormalized models which are mapped via JPA onto App Engine Datastore’s entity-based back-end. It’s tedious, painful and stilted, not to mention totally unnecessary. Just say no to DTO. With EMF, you can focus on the creative task of describing your domain, rather than on the tedious task of mapping high level concepts onto low-level persistence technologies, and you can exploit REST to its fullest. EMF is truly a smith for the cloud.

A Fine Demonstration

2010-09-27T05:45:00.006-05:00

I'm in Germany once again. Frank had his immigration interview at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin last week, so I came along. I'm glad that the flight to Germany from Vancouver isn't all that much longer than the flight from Toronto: only about 2 hours more.

The other day I went to the New Palace in Potsdam; it's one of the finest demonstrations of German culture, art, and craftsmanship I've every seen, and I've seen quite a bit this past year and a half!

Demonstrations of craftsmanship is exactly what we want for the Modeling Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe next month. If you have something cool, new, and interesting you'd like to show in action, please contact me as soon as possible at ed dot merks at gmail dot com.

As a general reminder, I'd suggest to register for ESE immediately; keep in mind too that the Nestor hotel runs out of rooms, so book now or plan for long walks. I'm really looking forward to my next trip to Europe. It will include not only Ludwigsburg and Berlin, but also a side trip to Zurich for Eclipse Enterprise Modeling Day. If you're interested in that, please register. Meanwhile, I'm plodding away with the EMF for GWT infrastructure to enable those interested to play with it at home. Stay tuned for fruits of that labor. Come to ESE to see it in live!

Taking to the Clouds

2010-08-25T10:08:00.003-05:00

I've been working hard these past weeks in my evil secret lair. Well, maybe not so secret, given that the results are, in true open source fashion, open: 323050. But it's definitely evil: among my tasks this week has been rejecting 6 out of every 7 Eclipse Summit Europe modeling submissions. I'm sure no one will take it personally and I'll remain ever so popular. Not! In any case, I'm taking to the clouds today!

That's right, I'm headed for Google's headquarters, with my brand new passport anxiously awaiting its first stamp of approval. (Did you know that a trip through the washing machine will launder all evidence of ever having been to the states?) It's Eclipse Day at the Googleplex where I'll be unveiling my master plan: world domination for Eclipse Modeling. Resistance is futile. Expect to be assimilated soon.

Looking Ahead, There's No Turning Back

2010-07-26T11:00:00.009-05:00

Time moves in but one direction, forward, so it's generally best spent looking ahead. It helps avoid hitting obstacles, something in which our girls take a personal interest.

Subjectively it moves slowly or quickly, but rarely slowly or quickly enough. With our move to Vancouver and the Helios release quickly receding into the past, there's definitely no turning back. One thing I can say for certain, neither pictures nor words can fully reflect the beauty that is British Columbia.

Did you know that the Helios release included 26 modeling projects? That's one for every letter of the alphabet! How many will be in Indigo? Time will tell. Modeling is most certainly an exciting place to get involved. Not quite as as exciting as wake boarding, mind you; yes, that's really me on the board!

Speaking of excitement and getting involved, our next main event is Eclipse Summit Modeling, err, I mean Europe. With all the excellent modeling content, it's all too easy to get the names confused. I'm a little torn on how to split the slots between tutorials and symposia; we have two half day slots. Probably it will be best to have a half day tutorial and a half day symposium. Given we can have only one tutorial, I'd like one that covers a broad range of technologies in a cohesive way, so I'm going to try to force people to work together on that. I'd also like a symposium that's more interesting than the one I organized last year, i.e., more discussion, less lecturing, more demos, fewer slides. Action packed is the goal. Oh well, that's my problem. Your problem is to get something submitted as soon as possible; the deadline is August 16th---no you can't wait until September---and the early bird contest deadline is August 2nd---only days away! Hurry, time waits for no one.

Looking ahead further, I'm a little concerned about the future of the Ecore Tools project. We had to give it a transfusion of life blood, Kenn's, Cedric's and my own, just to get it built for Helios, but it really needs some active committers for Indigo. Interested? It's a fairly big challenge to tackle, though not as big as this "stick" Else is trying drag out of the water. She's too ambitious to notice it's more of a log really. Not only that, the boat itself is tied to it.

Looking ahead on the personal front, I've been working hard on my own secret project: generating a GWT application that exploits App Engine. I suppose it's not really a secret given that I'm publicized to present this topic at the Modeling Day at Googleplex 2010, err, I mean the Eclipse Day... I'm making excellent progress. I'll be able to share the details when the gem is a little less rough. It's so very nice to be doing some really solid technical work for a change.

Patently Ridiculous

2010-05-07T02:15:00.002-05:00

Imagine you had an existing Java data model---a plain old one not based on EMF---that you wanted to map to an EMF model so you could take advantage of all of EMF's cool features. If your data model were a simple bean-style model, you could easily induce an Ecore model from its API; after all, that's what EMF's @model annotations do. You could then easily map instances of the plain old Java model to instances of your EMF model, perhaps using Java reflection, bringing together the old and the new.

What an exciting and innovative idea, you would exclaim to yourself, and to those around you, as you jumped for joy, reveling in your own brilliance.

Sorry to disappoint you, but don't bother. IBM has patented that: 7506303. The lesson learned? Just because something is simple and obvious doesn't mean you can't patent it. So run, don't walk, to your nearest patent lawyer, turn your obvious ideas into incomprehensible legal babel, file a claim, and then sue someone's assets right off their balance sheet, perhaps with the help of a patent troll. Surely such patented ridiculousness serves primarily to suck the lifeblood of the software sector much like collateralized debt objects did the vital stuff of the financial sector.

Change Begets Change

2010-04-30T05:41:00.010-05:00

Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast. I've not blogged in a couple of months amid the whirlwind of change that has become my life. I often feel more than a little in over my head these days.

Change is inevitable so best to embrace it, make it work in your favor. That being said, it's important to choose the path forward carefully, and the company you keep, wisely. It's all too easy to make a wrong turn or to pick up bad habits. Can you say gambling?

My life was on a very steady course up until the time I left IBM. That particular radical change was the beginning of many to follow; it was voluntary and good even in hindsight. But it was carefully planned like the rest of my life. The demise of my partner of 27 years, on the other hand, was untimely, arbitrary, and beyond my control. Such things make one reconsider life's carefully laid plans. It's clear that time is fleeting and that one must make the most of today because there is no guarantee for tomorrow. Workaholic Ed died and the phoenix that rose from his ashes took a really good look around. Guess what? There really is time for me to swim 2km every weekday morning. Go figure!

Looking around a little further, I discovered that I have the greatest neighbors in the world. Okay, granted Warren is a bit of a princess.

So's Linda come to think of it.

But they've helped me more in the last year and a half than one could reasonably expect from another human being. For example, they've looked after my girls for countless weeks whenever I traveled; the girls love it next door. Last week, they even threw a birthday party for Else, the most recent addition to my dog collection.

Most important of all, they've helped make my Frank feel more than a little welcome in his new home in Canada.

Warren and Linda are the epitome of what it means to be good friends and I consider myself fortunate for having them in my life.

Looking around further still at what's happening with modeling at Eclipse and beyond is also eye opening the the extreme. Talk about change that begets change! I'm more than a little gratified and relieved to see that it's taken on such vibrant life of its own. I don't need to obsess quite as much about driving the vision of modeling forward. There are so many others who do that job even better. I've learned an important lesson: don't push the river, it follows by itself! As Kim so aptly put it: Eclipse is like family. What a great family and what a great place to be. Thanks Cloudsmith and itemis for helping make it economically viable for me and for all their other great contributions to the Eclipse community.

Speaking of great places to be, it struck me a few months back that I'd much rather live back in British Columbia. I grew up there. My parents, brother, and sister live there. I like the weather better there. I can grow a more interesting garden there. Frank and I can build a new life together from scratch there. I only moved to Ontario for IBM. So I bought a great property with this view.

My house is already sold, I've got a rental house lined up, and I've scheduled my move for the end of May. Of course there are more changes yet to come.

I write this blog today from Berlin, in summer like weather, as I anticipate traveling to JAX in Mainz next week where there's an Eclipse day and a Modeling day. Could life get any more interesting and exciting?

Oh yes, and it turned out workaholic Ed didn't really die, he was merely transformed into a more well-rounded version of his former self. I've spend the past several weeks porting the core EMF runtime to GWT and modifying the generator to produce GWT-enabled models and edit support on top of that runtime. It's all committed to CVS in time for M7, but I've not had time for documentation yet. Modeling in the clouds; stay tuned for yet more change.

How Active is Your Committer Representative?

2010-02-08T21:21:00.000-05:00

Now that we're in the middle of an exciting Eclipse board of directors election campaign, you're probably asking yourself, how will I decide for whom to vote? You might well be swayed by folks like Bjorn who are actively campaigning; Bjorn's always got interesting new ideas. Then again, you might prefer Boris' more subtle approach of simply encouraging you to vote; I like that approach a lot! Or you might like Chris' approach of tirelessly and visibly helping to promote our community; how can you not like Chris for that? On the other hand, Doug's more edgy approach could well be just your thing; he's always thought provoking. Clearly it helps to be visible, so I'd better not be too quiet if I want another opportunity to be on the board; I doubt that simply looking pretty in pink will help...

One thing you might consider is how actively involved are the candidates. Here are some statistics about project involvement.

Most of the candidates are quite involved. There are of course a multitude of statistics one might consider, e.g., number of commits. For that you could compare the dash statistics for caniszczyk, bbokowski, dschaefer, bfreeman, and emerks. Great, just what I needed: a sad, ugly reminder of how unproductive my 2009 was; at least 2010 is off to a better start, both personally and professionally. Check out this lovely one-of-a-kind Kim Horne original water color that I recently had framed to hang in my office as a beautiful reminder of the diversity and creativity of our community.

In the end, the choice of representative is necessarily subjective. I'm sure folks will choose wisely based on who most closely represents their own point of view as well as who is most likely to make effective positive contributions. Having seen Chris and Boris in action first hand, I can definitely recommend them for their experience and for having represented the commiters well.

Peripatetic

2010-01-25T05:33:00.011-05:00

It was bound to happen: I was finally asked to be a model. I kid you not. The truth is stranger than fiction. It happened at Upper Canada Mall. Leaving a store that sells leather jackets, I was interrupted by a plaintiff "Excuse me sir, would you mind helping us out for a second." It turned out I was just the right build to act as a model for the lady's husband; she and two other ladies were picking a jacket for him. Being incredibly helpful and generally unable to say no, of course I obliged, volunteering my own opinion on which jacket fit best. All the while, visions of an easy life on the Paris runway just standing and modeling flashed before my eyes. But then I started to feel just like a piece of meat and I decided to keep my regular day job where looking pretty isn't all that important.

Life continues to be far too busy. It's pretty much impossible to balance my personal life with all the other demands on my time. I'm writing this post today from Berlin which is in the grip of a frigid winter not unlike the kind one normally expects in Toronto, so I feel right at home. Last weekend I was in Vancouver getting married. Tomorrow I head over to Munich where Peter and I present at OOP 2010; no, I will not be presenting in German though my German is definitely improving, something one might expect when you marry a German. The more German I learn---I can almost follow a conversation now---the more frustrated I am with not knowing more. This coming Thursday Ralph has arranged another Eclipse Stammtisch so I plan to attend that; I'm sure much German will be spoken. Maybe I'll see you there. I just hope it's not so cold.

I don't head back home to Toronto until February 2nd, but I expect to be back in Berlin yet again for the Modeling Code Camp at the beginning of March. Itemis does trainings like this as well. It's unfortunate that more people don't take advantage of the opportunity to get a jump start on exploiting open source technology. It might seem cheaper to muddle through on your own but suboptimal design decisions are likely a much bigger hidden cost down the road. EclipseCon will be yet another cost effective opportunity to learn new things, and yet another reason to travel. There will certainly be a great deal of modeling content. Too bad we couldn't accept more submissions. After EclipseCon I expect a short break in the travel schedule before I head over to Germany yet again for the JAX conference in Mainz. Maybe I should just move to Germany to save all the travel time.

On the Balance

2010-01-01T13:05:00.007-05:00

The new year is a time to reflect on how life is unfolding, to chart an effective course forward. Those who are wise consider carefully all the things for which to be grateful so that all the ways in which life inevitably short changes them loom less large. They temper their drive to satisfy their own personal needs and desires with consideration for their impact on the world around them. Life is a balancing act without a simple, obvious, optional strategy. Of course it's better to give than to receive, but only a fool gives to the greedy; something particularly germane in an open source community.

The wise avoid spending in inordinate amount of time focused on all the things around them that might be changed for the better because most of those things are beyond their control, not to mention the fact that "Better for whom?" is not always entirely clear. Instead they focus primarily on the very small number of things upon which they can personally have the most significant impact, always keeping in mind that the easiest things to change, and the biggest source of problems, are themselves.

For me personally, 2009 has been in part an extremely bad year; I've had to learn some painful lessons. Life is short, don't waste precious minute of it. Unfortunately everyone has to learn this lesson their own hard way, based on direct personal experience. I generally did my job poorly, or more positively stated, there's much room for improvement. I'm most grateful to itemis and Cloudsmith for their generous funding of my work and to my family, friends, and the Eclipse community for their support. All things considered, 2009 has also been an extremely good year; I've learned some my lessons exceedingly well and most importantly I've found the one thing I want most of all. On the balance, life is only as bad as you choose to perceive it and only as good as you take action to make it. Let's make 2010 an excellent year!

That Totally Sucks You Big Loser

2009-12-01T10:33:00.007-05:00

Suppose you went for dinner at someone's house and they served excellent wine, a fantastic main course, a scrumptious dessert, and a salad that made you want to gag. What would you do?

Compliment them on all the good things, overlooking the one bad thing.
Explain that the salad literally sickened you, carefully detailing exactly what was so awful about it.
Something between these two extremes.

Keep in mind that the blue cheese salad dressing might very well be fine quality; the real problem might be that the taste and smell of rotted milk just isn't your thing, i.e., the problem might be subjective, not objective.

It seems human nature to find fault with the world around us. It's not even bad thing. After all, how can one improve anything without constructive ideas for making them better? One must counter that with the fact that it's also human nature to take offense easily to anything that isn't entirely flattering. We generally prefer to hear mostly compliments, especially given the fact that we're getting asymptotically closer to the perfection for which we strive. That's why as children we're taught: if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all. Clearly that's a little too black and white, but that's yet another human failing: to over simplify problems and then come up with simplistic solutions to those. One thing to keep in mind in this drive to achieve perfection through criticism is that focusing on positives, or at least noticing them, generally makes one feel better, e.g., I noticed how lovely these maple trees looked and therefore spent much less time noticing that the wild pigs of Berlin had destroyed the lawn around it.

Given we're all so perfect, of course it's a virtue that we should speak our mind whenever a thought enters it. Every criticism we dish out should be seen as clear evidence of our drive for ultimate perfection. The sharper the critique, the more evident is our keen intellectual perceptiveness. Any mature adult ought to see our commentary as the good kind of criticism, i.e., the constructive kind. Those who do not are, well, over-sensitive, short-sighted losers to be perfectly blunt. With folks like that, one might as well waste time explaining to this water plant that the underwater lily bees aren't about to show up to pollinate it.

Personally I'm more than a little fed up with people complaining about the salad; it tends to ruin the dinner party for the host, and even the other guests who don't share the subjective distaste. It's especially disturbing when the host shrieks back a retort about the gawd awful choice of the complainer's dinner wear. One always has to wonder if the complainers could throw a dinner party or their own, especially given their lack of social graces. I'd suggest they think more carefully about the impact of their criticism before dishing it out. Is it actually valid critique to begin with, or is blue cheese simply not their thing? Most important of all, what good will come from the criticism? Is there perhaps a nicer, more effective way to achieve that goal with an approach that doesn't sound so critical? Sharing your favorite salad dressing recipes without a single word of criticism is probably an approach close to optimal.

Modeling Daze

2009-11-23T09:44:00.005-05:00

The Modeling Days have left me in a bit of a daze so I'm way behind with my blogging. The New York Eclipse Modeling Day was hosted by Credit Suisse in the smaller building next to their main tower across from Madison Garden.

Ian Skerret started the day with a quick introduction followed by Joe Wood of Credit Suisse who talked about how modeling is rapidly becoming a central aspect of Credit Suisse's information technology infrastructure. They're very focused on industry standards to help facilitate integration across organizations. Following those quick introductions, I did my stupid modeling talk.

After the morning break, Richard Wood of Credit Suisse presented a case study on model transformation. They're using oAW and EMF. He talked about Gobal Services as Enterprise Java Beans for which service interface definitions were specified as UML class models. It was a quick and dirty solution with the drawback that the UML API was complex to use and hence the templates were difficult to maintain. Using a specialized model to express web services helped simplify the transformation process of producing WSDLs and XSDs. In other projects they used profiled UML to describe the different design layers of a large project, i.e., the presentation layer and the business data layer, which they mapped onto a specialized DSL and from that generated the parts of the application. He also talked about generating a profiled UML instance from a model and talked about some of the lessons learned. The requirements for the model that are needed for generating is often different from the original high level model, so using transformation to produce the more specialized form can help simplify the design. He suggests to avoid generating directly from UML because it's too complex and that complexity obscures the logic of the templates to make them unreadable and unmaintainable. He feels that static content in templates needs to be independently maintained. He also advises to reuse existing technology whenever possible, e.g, the oAW XMLWriter. One of the questions afterward was about why UML was being used at all; the primary reason given was that UML is simply a standard requirement for which there is existing experience and tools.

After lunch, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Miles Daffin of Morgan Stanely, and I did our b3 talk. It went pretty well I think. The b3 project completed its creation review just last week, so we're off to the races! Our talk was followed by Eike's CDO talk where he explained many of the same things I've seen at the Munich code camp and at ESE, so it's starting to sound simple and familiar.

Moritz's talk about combining graphical and textual views followed the final break. He focused on some of the qualities of good textual notations, e.g., readability and writability, as well as the tooling aspects that further facilitate these aspects, e.g., syntax highlighting and content assist. Then he compared different aspects of textual and graphical notations, e.g., text tends to be presented in its entirety whereas graphics tends to hide much of the model in properties not directly visible.

The day finished with a closing panel where the panel asked the audience questions to stimulate more two-way interaction. All in all, it was a very fun day. One of the ladies I chatted with remarked how great it was to be able to attend a free mini-conference like this. "Usually something like this costs a lot of many," she remarked. Soon it was time to say goodbye to the bright lights of New York.

The Toronto modeling day was fun as well. It follow much the same format and included mostly the same content. IBM's facilities were very nice, but they asked us not to use cameras. It was especially nice to see some familiar faces. I did my stupid modeling talk yet again; people always seem to like it so that's rather gratifying. My build talk was after the break, so basically I talked the whole morning and was very tired after that. Following lunch I attended the MDE talk as well as Mile's AMP talk. Both were very interesting.

I think the Toronto day went even better than the New York; folks seemed more inclined to interact with each other. That same evening there was a demo camp as well, so we had even more opportunities to chat and mingle. If I wasn't so darned tired, I'd have taken a few pictures. With all the excitement behind me, Frank and I were able to focus on setting up this year's festival of lights.

We refuse to be outdone by our neighbors, not that we're competitive or anything.

Do It Better With A Model

2009-11-09T06:35:00.004-05:00

Has the spark of excitement in your life slowly dwindled? Do you suffer from performance anxiety? Are you concerned that you won't be able to fully satisfy Helios? Fear not for you are not alone! Fortunately for you, we have a new drug free solution. Forget about all those ads for pills and mechanical devices filling up your spam folder. We have discovered that real live models bring a whole new perspective.

Our carefully selected models aren't merely super, they're versatile and flexible enough to satisfy your every need. Just relax and let them do their thing. Of course if you feel so inclined, you can take control anytime the urge arises. If you aren't yet fully convinced that our stimulating models are exactly what you need, have a look at this testimonial from one our many completely satisfied customers. He's clearly taken aim and hit the mark, and he's not alone.

Best of all, our models aren't merely good for builds, they're good for development in general. Whether you like to do it top down, bottom up, or some other way we've not yet imagined, our models will be there to help you feel like the real developer you've always wanted to be. Your imagination is the only limitation, so take a bit of time to dream of the many exciting things our models might do for you do today. The e4 team has, and now there's no holding them back. Just keep in mind that no problem is too small or too big for our models. After all, I doubt this grand palace was built without the aid of a model.

We're so fully convinced that our models are world class, we've scheduled free modelings days in two of North America's great cities: New York and Toronto. Register immediately for these exclusive events before time runs out! You'll spend a fun filled day learning about b3, Xtext, CDO, AMP, Papyrus, and SAP's exciting new query technology from some of the world's leading experts as well as discovering how these technologies have been effectively exploited. Not only that, all four authors of the EMF book are expected to be at the Toronto event, so bring your books to be signed. At the end of the day, I'm sure you'll agree: it's simply more exciting to do it with models.

Eclipse Summit Europe 2009: The Final Day

2009-10-30T00:35:00.012-05:00

The day started with Tony Ballenti's keynote about the dynamics of open source.

He explored the various reasons why organizations get involved in open source and how that motivation matures over time.

As with all things in life, investing more effort generally generates more reward, or at least the potential for that. Nevertheless, many if not most are quite comfortable investing very little while still reaping significant rewards. Tony spent a lot of time talking about ecosystems with these takeaways.

From a modeling perspective, we've gained a great deal of value from innovative individuals including many researchers. In addition, a significant number of companies have grown in this space and are investing heavily in it, which is very good if you consider where we'd be if we still relied primarily on the two large organizations that kicked off this venture.

After the break, during which I talked with Bernd, Boris, and Kai about using Xtext to specify a CSS subset for e4 styling, was Kenn Hussey, Raphael Faudou, and Patrick Tessier's Papayrus talk.

The room was way overcrowded and there just wasn't enough air. They outlined the history of the project, i.e., they started as a number of separate external UML tool efforts. These efforts merged under the Papyrus 2 umbrella which is now producing some very slick looking technology. Kenn described the "perfect storm" that's bringing things together.

The project aims to separate out a DSL backbone that can be reused with other models such as SysML, BPMN2, and so on. Stay tuned for other developments in the area of a common DSL workbench...

Markus Herrmannsdoerfer's COPE talk was in the same room and it was even more crowded, so much so that people just couldn't fit in the room anymore.

I assume many people have data that needs to be migrated as their models change. Go figure. The idea behind Cope is to track the changes made to the Ecore model and then apply those same operations to the actual instance data. He demonstrated how it really works with a simple state machine model.

Hajo Eichler's Model Execution Framework talk was also in the same room.

Thank goodness someone figured out how to open a window or I'd have died by now. He did a bit of slide "borrowing" for his talk; Eike and I made it clear intend to send the license police after him. Quickly thereafter, you could hear the police sirens out in the street, and he looked worried. He showed how he extended the Ecore model to be able to express behavior using a subset of UML activities. There's an intepretter to execute the model as well as a debugger for interactively tracking the execution process. It looks very promising.

After that was lunch, during which Thomas, Henrik and I talked with Wayne about how we can help with aggregating p2 repositories for Helios and for projects not on the release train. Unfortunately, I missed all the afternoon sessions dealing with modeling project management issues. If I told you about them, I'd have to kill you. I really wanted to see EuGENia;I heard from others that it was really cool. I also wanted to see the progress that was made on EEF. It was a bit of a bummer to miss all the interesting sessions that afternoon. There should be more time for chatting at these conferences...

By late afternoon, word had gotten out that it was my birthday. During the closing session, Ralph incited the entire audience to sing happy birthday for me. How embarrassing is that? According to German custom, I should have bought cake for everyone and invited them all to a party. Sorry dudes, I can't afford that much cake. As expected, ESE just keeps getting better each year and I look forward to next year.

Eclipse Summit Europe 2009: A Day of Talks

2009-10-29T00:48:00.008-05:00

The morning started with the keynote about functional programming by Don Syme of Microsoft.

I loved functional programming back in my university days, which seems like so many eons ago. He argues that certain classes of problem are far simpler to solve using functional programming and shows a number of examples where F#'s syntax is far simpler, i.e., less verbose, than C#. Personally though, I'm not one who easily buys into the idea that syntactic conciseness in and of itself makes a language significantly better. Simplicity of the underlying semantic/mental model is ultimately what counts, and that of course needs to be balanced against expressiveness power, which generally is the counter point to simplicity. F# definitely looks powerful.

The break was an opportunity for many interesting discussions. One of the great things about conferences is the face to face discussions they facilitate. The summit is particularly conducive to that type of interation. Unfortunately that resulted in missing the start of the e4 talk. The diverse e4 team has made a lot of progress.

After another yummy lunch I was torn between Sven's Xtext talk and Tom's e4 model talk. Two cool things at once. Darn! I know more about Xtext than the e4 model, so I opted for the latter. It was interesting hearing all Tom's reasons for using EMF in e4.

He showed how a simple application model specifies the logical structure of the user interface, eliminating the need to build up these structures with a pile of boilerplate Java code. Then he showed how to extend that base scaffolding with embedded parts. He even showed an example where one process is editing an e4 model stored in a CDO repository while another process is rendering that same model from the shared repository in the actual UI; changes are immediately reflected across the process boundary effecitvely giving you a WYSIWYG editor. He also explained how you can define your own renderer to display the same model in various different ways. It's looking very good!

After that I attended Bernd Kolb and Christian Mohr's query talk.

Bernd explained some of the shortcomings of the existing EMF query technology; it's definitely pretty crude. SAP had some existing query infrastructure that was part of their proprietary MOF implementation; that's what's being contributed to Eclipse. They demonstrated examples of the cool SQL-like query language they support. The query execution engine makes use of the EMF index project, but can work against in memory resources as well as directly against a database too.

Frederic Jouault and Hugo Bruneliere's EMF Oslo talk was next.

They explained that M consistst of three complementary languages: MSchema, MGraph, and MGrammer, analogous to Ecore, EObject, and Xtext. Bridging these technologies involves mapping these specific concepts. To start one could define an Ecore model for MSchema so that it's possible to transform Ecore instances to MSchema instances which could then be serialized to conform of the MSchema textual syntax. They demonstrate their progress toward implementing this approach including ATL transformations for doing the mapping.

Henrik Lindberg and Thomas Hallgren's b3 talk followed a short break.

One might summarize the approach as model driven builds. Key aspects of the build and provisioning process are captured as declarative models, e.g., buildable units which are analogous to p2's installable units, and these ultimately drive the build process. Xtext is being used to provide human readable syntax for the build models. There's a lot of cool stuff planned! If you're working on an Eclipse project, you're probably painfully aware of how much of a nightmare it currently is to set up and maintain your builds. Goodness forbid someone changes the requirements for what needs to be pumped out at the end!

After that I had a chance to chat with a guy hoping to get involved in GEF, a project that certainly needs some fresh and lively committers. Maybe I'll be able to help. This was followed by the Buckminster talk from Henrik, Thomas, and Filip Hrbek.

It attracted a very large audience.

Henrik explained that provisioning a workspace or building a p2 repository ought to be as simple as ordering your favorite burger at your burger outlet of choice.

Filip and Thomas demonstrated that it's as simple as specifying a query to locate the root feature and asking for its p2 repository to be built.

The tools, e.g., the dependency visualizer, are looking very slick. They also demonstrated the repository aggregator, which is based on an EMF model and an EMF generated editor. It can even produce a Maven repository as well as a p2 repository. How cool is that? At the end they explained how the lessons learned from building Buckminster will be used to drive further improvements into the b3 project. Models, models, everywhere.

This was followed by the reception. It included a talk by Microsoft that felt a little too much like advertisement to me. Oh well, they paid for the the food and the spirits---the salmon was excellent and so was the wine---so it was a reasonable trade-off. I finished the day at a birds of a feather session discussing how to transform the modeling project into something suited for supporting a DSL workbench as well as how interested consumers could help fund that effort. It was a very interesting day indeed!

Eclipse Summit Europe 2009: Tutorials and Symposia

2009-10-28T00:38:00.015-05:00

Eclipse Summit Europe started today. The weather was very mild making the short walk from Nestor Hotel to the Schlosspark Forum particularly enjoyable. It's a grand looking facility.

Eike, Tom, and I started the day with the EMF Tutorial. It was an extremely large group of people.

They didn't all fit in one picture.

I started with basic concepts about resource management and XML serialization, Eike went into depth about CDO, and Tom finished with an overview of EMF's data binding integration.

The Modeling Symposium also had a very large turnout.

The room was packed.

Christian Meier of UBS kicked off the Modeling Symposium with a presentation about the relevance of modeling in the enterprise.

He would like to see Eclipse evolve toward a first class IDE for developing models with integration through repositories to better manage the integrity of large interdependent models as they are modified by distributed groups of developers.

Eike continued with a brief demonstration of CDO as applied to his eDine restaurant model.

He showed how several applications can coordinate around a single repository and thereby reflect changes made to the state at that central repository.

Next Frédéric Madiot of Mia-Software presented the MoDisco project which is focused on discovering the models that underlie complex applications.

This information can be used to evolve and modernized those applications. He showed the generic browser that can help analyze any EMF model. It supports specifying queries that can be used to alter how the model is viewed. He shows how this can be used to specify a derived feature that's external to the actual model. Once you induce an interesting view on the model, you could use those queries to extract that into a formal model of the application.

Next Skhiri Sabri of Euranova demonstrated his live model to model transformation technology.

He talked about how an underlying model drives many of the related parts of an overall application. They have a model for the UI, a model for the data objects, and a modeled transformation layer for mapping the object model onto the UI. The tansformation layer is designed to listen to the source instances so that it can update the target instances as the source changes. In many ways, it acts similar to data binding, but is focused on always on live model to model transformation. It would have been cool to see it in action.

Markus Voelter did a lightning presentation about feature models which are used for managing variability.

A feature model describes how a valid instance is composed of parts, some of which might be mandatory, optional, or perhaps one choice of many options.

Frédéric Jouault of Ecole Des Mines Nantes described the MDE diploma he's helping to develop.

It will teach students basic MDE concepts and technologies with a focus on things that have direct industrial application. He outlined the basic curriculum they plan to support. It will include an internship program.

Cédric Vidal of ProxiAD described EMF Customerizer, a technology for customizing generated models.

It uses a CSS-style syntax for expressing the customization. This way the customizations can be expressed external to the model and hence can be reapplied to a modified version of that model. Perhaps in the future, direct changes to a model could be persisted as a customization.

Sebastian Benz of BMW presented EFactory, a textual syntax for creating instances of Ecore models.

He used Xtext to define it and showed how it could be used as textual syntax for building Ecore itself. How cool is that?

Cédric Brun demonstrated Acceleo's support for MTL. It looks like a nice language and the editor is quite slick.

There is support for prototype-based template generation, traceability hooks, and even a profiler to help tune generator performance. Very impressive.

During the final discussions, we talked about the problem of wanting fine grained object level repositories as well course grained textual resources. Part of the issue is how often do conflicts arrive from simultaneous users. But even there, a textual file can be converted to a model, and comparisons can be done at the model level instead of the file level when merging changes. The problem is often establishing identity, which is generally lost in a modified textual representation. Names could be used for identity, but refactoring can change a name. Ideally we could edit textually but not produce wholesale changes in the underlying model. It was an interesting discussion, but such a large room with a large group is not a great venue for including all the interested parties.

Afterward I sat through the Foundation 2.0 Symposium, but I quickly started to feel that pulling out a fingernail would be far less painful. I'm still not sure why model bashing is a necessary part of improving the foundation. Consider the 150+ people interested in modeling at ESE today, you'd feel safe to assume that modeling is quite an important part of the foundation's future. Oh well, you can't please all of the people all of the time. At least things progressed to more constructive contributions, such as how best to build an ecosystem where people can pay for bug fixes as well as fund feature development. I had to leave early for the sponsor's dinner, which was far more enjoyable!

Life in the Fast Lane

2009-10-23T02:54:00.008-05:00

Do you ever feel as if life is speeding by in a blur? I often feel that way these days.

My time in Berlin is rapidly nearing the end. How can the last five weeks have gone by so quickly? It's been more than a bit little dazzling.

Next week is Eclipse Summit Europe, so I'll be off to Ludswigburg. I love the cozy atmosphere of the summit! I've been fortunate to have been able to attend every single one; I've only missed one EclipseCon, but let's not go there. The summit gets better every year so I have particularly high expectations. No doubt it will be grand.

Ralph would be very happy if you registered immediately; we all live to make him happy, don't we? Of course it will make your pocket happier not to wait until next week. Note that last I checked, there were at least 60 people planning to attend the modeling symposium. Bernd and I have a few interesting sessions lined up already, but there's still room if you having something cool you'd like to show off. It doesn't have to be anything too formal.

The registration for the Eclipse Modeling Days is looking very good too. That's something to look forward to after Frank, Else, and I leave Berlin behind at the beginning of November. These days, Berlin is the city of lights; I'll always remember it fondly.

When you live life in the fast lane, there's never a dull moment. I even fixed almost the entire defect backlog this week!

Much Ado About Modeling

2009-10-16T00:05:00.007-05:00

What a relief! Eike and I completed our Code Camp yesterday here in Munich. It was a great deal of effort to prepare the material and given my strong dislike for working on powerpoint slides, all the advanced work seemed particularly onerous. But it was fun once we got started and now that it's done we have excellent material for the next time. The attendees were certainly very positive in their reviews; look at how studious they were doing their exercises.

Everyone had a great time and even I learned a lot listening to Eike's excellent presentation about CDO. CDO is totally cool and I bet a lot more people would use it if they knew more about it. Eike's CDO tutorial at ESE on October 27th is bound to be well attended; Tom will also be involved to explain how EMF and databinding are as complimentary as nuts and chocolate. Speaking of totally cool, the DSL tutorial at ESE I'm sure will be a big hit as well; Xtext is one of my favorite things. It goes without saying that attending the ESE Modeling Symposium after the tutorial of your choice is an absolute must; don't forget to send us your abstracts so we can prepare a fascinating agenda. It's clear that October 27th will be all modeling all the time! Even the b3 symposium and the e4 symposium are about modeling. In Germany, every time you turn around, there's another model, or statue if you like.

Of course you don't have to attend ESE to learn more about modeling. For example, the itemis guys are doing several training sessions in the coming weeks, not to mention the upcoming modeling days in Toronto and New York. Don't forget to register! Personally I'm very excited to learn more about the Agent Modeling Platform, among other things; Miles is doing some really cool stuff. There are definitely interesting things on the horizon as well as a clear path for how to get there.

Eike and I were going to go sight seeing in Munich today, but it's unseasonably cold---it snowed the last few days--- and we're just not properly equipped with warm jackets, so we'll head back to Berlin around noon. I'm not exactly sure what to sink my teeth into next.

No doubt it will be modeling related. Perhaps I should tackle that growing defect backlog!

Really Big Models

2009-10-06T02:47:00.006-05:00

My modeling pilgrimage to Nantes the other week was most enjoyable. The stupid modeling talk went over well and it was great fun spending time with Jean as well as the academic and industrial modeling researchers from the area. Instead staying at an impersonal hotel, Stéphane, Etienne, and Cédric each hosted me at their respective homes. I even participated in the swimming portion of the La Baule Triathalon. Checkout out my awesome team.

After the triathlon, we played soccer for a few hours; I hate to admit that I had trouble walking the next few days. Thanks to the Nathalie Effect, my soccer team crushed the other team; sorry Etienne, better luck next year. The day was rounded off by a giant barbecue party at Cedric's country estate.

Since then I've been working with Eike to prepare for the Eclipse Code Camp which is next week; did I ever mention how much I dislike preparing slides? I've also been working with Ian on the plans for the Eclipse Modeling Days as well as with Bernd on the agenda for Eclipse Summit Europe's Modeling Symposium. If you're interested in participating in these events please let us know! Lately I feel like I've bitten off more than I can chew...

This last weekend was a special event for Berlin: the wall came down twenty years ago. As part of the festivities, I saw the biggest model ever!

The small giant above was 7 meters tall but the big one was 14 meters!!

I can say without fear of contradiction that models are big in Germany!

What's All This Fuss About Modeling?

2009-09-24T02:53:00.008-05:00

I've been incredibly busy these past few weeks. After getting home from Berlin last month I headed for California two days later to present at the Googleplex. My presentation was about build and provision of all things! Speaking of which, did you see the b3 proposal? Clearly models are good for everything, including builds. While in California I met up with Peter who presented an introduction to DSLs. It was an excellent talk and overall the Google folks hosted a great event. Afterward, Peter came back to my place for a visit, and the next day Frank, Eike, and Rene arrived as well. It was kind of a German invasion of my home but my killer guard dogs lost their killer instinct long ago.

Peter only stayed for a few days, but the rest stayed until just this past weekend. While I went to Boston last week for the Eclipse Board meeting---yet more travel---the guys took a trip to Ottawa to visit Kenn and Lynn. The girls are always concerned whenever anyone left the house with suit cases.

Given that I have several events to attend in Europe in the coming weeks, I decided to head back to Berlin along with my guests. Frank and I arrived Monday after a flight in which nearly everything that can go wrong did go wrong. How exactly does a confirmed flight segment disappear from the system? No really, I do want to end up in Berlin, not Frankfurt! And no, I don't want just one of us to be upgraded to business, thanks for the kind offer. It made me a little prickly, but all is well that ends well.

On Monday I got a chance to spend time with Wolfgang Neuhaus who made a special trip out to Berlin so we could discuss itemis business in person. We spent a sunny day at a lovely cafe a short walk from Frank's place and decided to avoid sitting under the chestnut trees which were dropping spiked chestnut bombs with frightening regularity. It was very enjoyable. This area of Berlin is incredibly beautiful, especially the botanical garden!

Yesterday I headed to Nantes to spend time with my friends at Obeo. Today I'll talk again about the unbearable stupidity of modeling. I'll be presenting in French; just kidding! Jean Bezivin invited me to present and I'm just a boy who can't say no. It's simply beautiful here in Nantes, and the people I'm staying with are all so nice. Too bad I forgot my camera!

In an upcoming week I'll be helping Eike with the Eclipse Code Camp. I'll be presenting in German; just kidding! It will be four action packed days of fun and learning so don't miss the opportunity if you're able to find your way to Munich the week of October 12, or is that Oktober. I feel a bit dazzled these days.

For Eclipse Summit Europe I'm going to clone myself so I can attend both the Modeling Symposium and the B3 Symposium. Speaking of which, for the modeling symposium we want to give people a chance to present short 10-15 minute presentations about the modeling technology they're working on or to propose discussion topics. If you're interested, please send a short abstract for a talk or a proposal for a discussion topic to ed.merks@gmail.com and bernd.kolb@sap.com; please use a subject line of the form [ese2009]...

And finally, in November, there are going to be some Eclipse Modeling Days, but that's a secret, so I can't tell you about it, especially not about their secret locations in Toronto and New York. We're still gathering abstracts. Interested?

Berlin's Eclipse Modeling Stammtisch

2009-08-20T01:32:00.010-05:00

The Eclipse Modeling Stammtisch in Berlin yesterday was a lot of fun. Eike and I arrived a few minutes late only to realize we'd really not made good arrangements for how to find others at the huge beer garden. Eike took off his hat to be more easily recognizable; clearly I should have worn my pink shirt. Fortunately it didn't take us long to find the early birds; the hats with little propellers really helped. Beer is not my drink of choice, but I'm acquiring a taste for weißbier so I promptly started on one of those. After the social lubricant, we got down to some real hard work. First we created an economic model which we used to resolve the economic crisis.

Then we built a climate model and promptly came up with a way to halt global warming without banning SUVs.

Next we hashed out a new food distribution model to solve the problem of world hunger; there really is plenty of good food to go around.

And finally we created a new agent model to arrive at a proven policy for achieving world peace. We're calling the new policy: Open Source for Open Minds.

When all the great problems of our times were resolved, Ralph showed up to shower us with praise and more importantly, the free beer I promised.

I lost track of time after that. Good company and good beer tends to do that! Thanks for the fun time to those of you who came; sorry you couldn't make it to all the rest of you. Maybe next time...

Eclipse Modeling Stammtisch Plans

2009-08-18T02:26:00.005-05:00

As my plane approached Frankfurt early Friday morning, the sun peeked over the horizon with promises of good things to come, which of course includes tomorrow's Eclipse Modeling Stammtisch Eike, Ralph, and I blogged about last week.

So far nineteen people have responded to our poll. We'll host the Stammtisch at Der Biergarten of the PraterGarten and start at around 6:30PM. What better place for free beer? It seats 600, in case a few more people decide to join the last minute. This is a golden opportunity to meet and greet!

Don't miss it. See you tomorrow, i.e., Wednesday August 19th.

Berlin: There I Go Again

2009-08-11T13:35:00.006-05:00

Berlin was so cool I'm going back later this week to see all the things I missed in June.

Eike, Ralph, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to host an Eclipse Modeling Stammtisch on Wednesday August 19th. If you're not into modeling, you're still more than welcome to join the party; expect to be converted into the fold.

Please let us know your intent to join by completing this poll. We'll find a good location based on attendance. Did I mention Ralph's promise of free beer?

On Dead Lines

2009-08-03T12:54:00.006-05:00

Although lines don't die, deadlines are nevertheless an ugly fact of reality. In particular, the opportunity to submit a talk for Eclipse Summit Europe 2009 is rapidly reaching its inevitable conclusion. This year's drop dead date is August 19th so you have just barely over two weeks to dilly-dally before it's too late. After that, it will just be so much water under the bridge, or is that over the falls...

The runtime folks are certainly off to a running start with their submissions---not that I'm competitive or anything---while the modeling submissions are sadly lagging. No doubt folks are busy modeling their submissions first and will hence be far ahead of the game in the end. Of course my whining is really just a case of the pot calling the kettle black given that I've not yet submitted a proposal for the modeling symposium, as I committed to doing several weeks ago. In my defense, I've been traveling and Vancouver was way too beautiful to spend at a computer! To my credit, today I'm working during a holiday.

Grieving Over the Death of a Cash Cow

2009-07-07T03:42:00.005-05:00

A sizable portion of the software cash cow herd is dying and our industry is learning to cope with grief, the natural expected response to death. Grief is painful, but absolutely necessary and completely unavoidable. Shock, anger, guilt, obsession, depression, confusion, and feelings of helplessness, emptiness, and loneliness are among grief's many facets. It's almost too much to bear.

Once upon a time, vast herds of carefully controlled cash cows were tended with loving care until some of the cows mutated and escaped. Actually, let's be frank, the cows were deliberately genetically engineered and then set lose with the disruptive intent, e.g., to undermine competing herds of cash cows. Those with the biggest herds were often in the best position to sacrifice a few cows and could draw attention to the virtue of their sacrificial offerings. Consider though how much it cost to develop what's at Eclipse today, i.e., hundreds of millions. No doubt this is dwarfed by commercial investments in Linux, i.e., multiple billions. Do these appear to be purely noble acts intended to build a grand public edifice?

Most certainly open source investment is generally not a selfless act; yes, it really does involve investment and yes, there is virtue in it as well. However, whenever a valuable resource is consumed, a return is expected. It is the economic way of the things. There can be no exceptions for long. So we must wonder, who will continue to tend the free cows and what return on investment do they expect? I.e., what is the emerging business model for our future software economy? In other words, how will Eike stock his bar so the goodness of CDO continues to flow?

I've already suggested that open source can act as a way of targeting competitors by undermining their cash flow thereby making them less of a competitive threat. Of course that tends to commoditize the domain so that no one makes money from it. A related strategy is to open source only part of the solution, just the basic frameworks and capabilities, and then provide value added software to drive revenue, i.e., a free cow complemented by a cash cow. In principle this can be quite effective because consumers love free things. From that perspective, open source software is almost like a coupon. If it could be contained to that, we'd not need a new business model, so this approach is a pinnacle of success and has shining appeal.

Another approach is to just open source everything. After all, we all know that free software still takes effort to install, learn, use effectively, and keep up-to-date, so there's still money to be made in the services around all this "free" software. Unfortunately, all this free software has produced a debilitating almost viral condition known as freetardation: the irrational belief that paying a dollar for anything software related is offensive in principle. How many organizations and individuals don't end up spending person weeks of time and effort doing poorly something they could have accomplished more effectively with appropriate technology or expert assistance at a small fraction of the real cost? The old penny wise pound foolish principle often rears its ugly head particularly when all the costs and benefits are not properly measured. The problem with the service model is that it's not a license to print money the same ways as is selling software. Software is practically infinitely scalable, i.e., just provide enough download bandwidth, while service generally requires more people, highly skilled people who are themselves expensive and in short supply. Still, it's also a proven model that's held up well.

A valuable aspect of open source software that's more easily overlooked is as protection against vendor lock-in. A few weeks ago at one of the banks it was explained to me that they're fed up with the products they're using. They're too expensive and provide little value over and above what's available in open source. What they're most frustrated with is that each year the salesmen show up with a laundry list of cool new features that justify the upgrade price and yet doesn't include a single feature they actually need. Open source provides better cost control and a better hedge against arbitrary future changes. Self service is even possible and while open source software too can change, there's always the option to fork. Decision makers are in a much better position these days to control their destiny.

I'm not really sure how this will all unfold in the longer term. I doubt anyone is, but the trend toward open source is clear. Probably some of the cash cows will survive, perhaps the value-add approach will work well, at least for those most skilled at riding the leading edge of the crashing wave, but most certainly the service model will survive regardless, because all the models rely on service. This should give committers pause for a bit of self reflection.

Personally I'm not grieving, at least not over the demise of software cash cows. Like other committers at Eclipse, I am a highly skilled expert, and that puts me and professionals like me in the driver's seat. We fit into the economic picture regardless of what business model prevails. If you think of software as content, much like a song, book, or movie is content, then we are the content producers. If you think of software as a service, we are the service providers. There is no software without us, and no, ten unskilled workers will not produce the same result as will one highly skilled individual. So while employers will be tempted to farm out your job to someone else if they think they can save a dollar, they're definitely going to need someone just like you. By being the best at what you do, you're in an excellent position to control your destiny because those in need of expertise will often be willing to pay top dollar to get the very best.

Talking About Connected Data Objects

2009-07-02T08:09:00.004-05:00

My personal Berlin tour guide, Eike Stepper, and I did a Galileo Series Podcast about CDO with James Sugrue the other day.

Eike and his rapidly growing team are doing some extremely cool things with CDO, so you might be interested to find out more.

Going Gaga Over Galileo

2009-06-24T05:49:00.007-05:00

As a true friend of Eclipse, I had early access to Galileo and thanks to the fast friendly mirror, I downloaded the classic SDK in just over three minutes. A friend of mine who isn't a friend of Eclipse (and who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) is finding his download will take an hour. Friendship is a bountiful font from which many good things flow and that brings a smile to my face.

Cloudsmith, my latest additional benefactor, is providing a cool community service that we've dubbed Galileo Plus. Projects like Teneo and CDO provide integration with LGPL libraries like Hibernate that can't be distributed by Eclipse. The p2 repository at http://download.cloudsmith.com/galileoplus/ is basically a clone of the Galileo repository with additional libraries such as Hibernate. Don't worry if your browser says the page for this link has forbidden access, there really is a p2 repository there and you can add it as a site in your installer like this:

Now clients of these modeling technologies have a p2 site with one-stop-shopping for their installation needs; you'll find additional categories like "Net4j Database Adapters" and "Third Party Libraries" among other things. We intend to grow this repository to include more missing bundles as well as other interesting additional bundles. If your project could benefit from this type of one-stop-shopping, send me a note and let the good times flow.

Goodbye Galileo, hello Helios.

Blow Away the Blues in Berlin

2009-06-12T08:22:00.008-05:00

Blue is my favorite color, but being a bit blue bites badly. I remind myself frequently that life's colors are just as bright as they ever were, it's just my perception that's changed.

For this reason, I'm very much looking forward to blowing away my blues with a trip to Berlin next week. I've never been there before, and Eike Stepper will be my personal tour guide, so I'm totally stoked. The Eclipse Board of Directors meets June 17 and 18. As Mike mentioned, it's the first meeting of the board outside of the states and it's in Germany in recognition of the large number of German members who have been traveling across the planet for so many years; consider how far California is from Germany! I don't suppose it's very green regardless of where we have the meetings.

As a small part of my fun filled week, we're planning a modeling party on June 16th starting at 7:00PM at the Bavarium hosted by Eike and yours truly. We promise free beer and witty commentary. A professional photographer will attend. If you plan to partake, please register your intent. Well, I confess I've become a bit delusional; it's actually a "Meet the Board Members Stammtisch," but I'm a board member and you'll get to meet Eike and me, so that makes it a modeling party, in my humble opinion. See you there!

I Don't Care Much for Words of Doom

2009-06-01T09:24:00.000-05:00

Likely it's mostly a reflection of personal sensitivity given my fluctuating moods of late, but it seems to me I've witnessed more negative navel gazing in the past few weeks than is entirely healthy. The balance between optimism and pessimism is always a challenge, but if you pay attention only to the rain brought on by life's dark clouds, you'll tend to miss the bright colors revealed when the sun peeks out, as it inevitably does.

It's best to be on guard against creeping negative attitudes because positive change flows only from constructive actions and those actions are nurtured by the feeling of empowerment.

In every problem lies an opportunity that's waiting for someone to take action. Of course there is value in identifying problems; the world if full of arm chair critics who excel at that. There is even more value in identifying solutions; there tends to be a plethora of those as well. But in the end, the greatest value lies in taking action. After all, grand designs don't build themselves.

One of the problems I see is a lack of leadership from many of Eclipse's largest commercial members. We could bemoan that situation at length, but I gave up on that approach last July; soon it will be a year since I threw my shackles away. It's best to view the current situation as an excellent opportunity for smaller players and even individuals to step in and take charge. Don't complain about the economic downturn either. Sure this presents a significant barrier to all the players large and small, but those who persist will prevail and those who whine will fail. We should feel empowered by the extent to which individuals are making a significant impact at Eclipse; history is rife with such individuals and ultimately they shape our world.

I don't care much for words of doom. We should look beyond problems toward solutions and then take the next step toward action. And don't look to others to take those actions, look to yourself. Are those imaginary shackles constraining you? Throw them off! If someone tells you it can't be done, prove them wrong. Your greatest feeling of accomplishment will come from overcoming the most daunting adversity, so embrace challenges with a vengeance.

If Only it Were That Simple

2009-04-30T05:08:00.002-05:00

Simplicity is a holy grail touted as an ideal for which to strive. Keep it simple stupid, KISS, is sacred doctrine. Yet is the world a simple place? Are the problems you are solving simple? Are Java or C++ simple languages? In fact, do simple things ever stay simple? After all, C evolved into C++, and Java too evolved to support generics and enumerations, and those clearly didn't make the languages simpler. Consider too why it is that a simple mind is not a good thing despite the fact that simplicity is such a good thing. The reason is simple: extremes are typically not optimal. In the end, there needs to be a delicate balance between simplicity and complexity. I certainly don't want my garden to be simple!

Consider for example a Turing machine. With an optimally simple set of symbols, i.e., only zeros and ones, it's effectively impossible to come up with a simpler computational model. So why don't we all flock to this simplicity? Because it's a mirage. The expression of our solution isn't helped by the simplicity of the Turing machine, rather it's hurt by the lack of expressiveness. It's for this very reason that I bristle when I hear people say that EMF is too complex. I'll argue that it's neither too simple nor too complex, it's a higher level abstraction and it's just right. If you can do better, make my day sunny.

So many people are so used to solving their problems with rocks and pointed sticks that the mere thought of more sophisticated technology scares them away. This situation is particularly ironic because these same people are typically working on foisting some synthesized technology of their own on their unsuspecting end users. Of course everything they produce is simple, right? It's always the other guy who produces complexity. After all, I understand my stuff, so therefore it's simple, right?

Here is what I consider to be the gist of rocks and pointy sticks argument. Why would I need to build a big fire with my pointy sticks, and smelt my rocks to render metal, just so I can make a better rock or pointy stick? It's such a complicated process and it's so much extra work given that I can just smack my problems with rocks and poke them with pointy sticks already. Well, guess what folks, some of us have seen a way to move beyond the stone age caves, but feel free to hang out in yours, if that's where you feel most comfortable.

I totally agree with Michael Scharf's blog about the problem of How to Explain EMF? How do you describe something that's both a floor wax and a dessert topping? It's just not that simple. The responses to his blog were very interesting too, and while there is underlying truth in them, they typically also miss the point a bit. Consider for example that given an XML Schema, or simply annotated Java interfaces, EMF will generate a fully functional Eclipse IDE or RCP application. You don't have to know much of anything about Eclipse, and poof, there you go, a running application. That's pretty simple. It takes about a minute. But then you start to dissect it and realize oh my goodness, there's a lot going on here and gosh but it all seems so complicated. That's right because it's a complicated problem, yet would it have been simpler to have spent the months it would have taken to learn how to get all that working from scratch? No it would not! But feel free to hang out in your cave chipping stones and sharpening sticks if that gives you a sense of purpose.

Even with modeling's layered architecture, people complain that all the layers are confusing. Granted very little of modeling is well documented, the marketing message is poor, and the web organization leaves much to be desired, but please people, is there an alternative to layered architecture? Don't forget too that EMF has a book. I think this really is Michael's fundamental point, i.e., poor marketing. Rather than polishing the technology, which as developers is what we (and most of all I) like best, we need to address this marketing problem with a higher level of priority.

There's even the premise that modeling is good but EMF, not so much. The argument is actually stronger than that: EMF stifles modeling and harms the ecosystem. I think the important point being missed here is the extreme value of "the one model to bind them all," i.e., Ecore/EMOF. The modeling ecosystem is rife with other meta models---gosh but I dislike using the word meta. For example, there's UML, BPMN, XML Schema, and so on. This reality is not the hallmark of a constrained ecosystem. In each case, the value of the model is enhanced by the fact that Ecore/EMOF is the underlying meta meta model---gosh, two metas in a row, I should be shot.

Here's a fundamental assertion I'm sure will never be proven wrong: if you tried to replace Ecore/EMOF and the rest of EMF's core with something better, you'd merely end up with another EMF; only if you're lucky (people care about what you've done) and highly skilled (you've learned from EMF's successes and mistakes) might it actually be relevant and a bit better. In any case, feel free to build another ecosystem if you're feeling lucky and skillful. Don't forget to take sociology into account; you're likely better off in an established ecosystem.

No doubt it's true that I'm way too steeped in this technology to understand the perspective of someone looking at it for the first time, but surely there have been plenty of people looking at it for the first time that just a few of them might have tried to help out the next guy with their fresh insights; kudos to Michael on that front! E.g., these are the five things that took me weeks to grasp and would have been nice to have realized up front. Ultimately, simplicity like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. May you always see simplicity where others see complexity so you can lead the way forward.

A Truly Good Person

2009-04-16T08:19:00.003-05:00

A great many people from the Eclipse community as well as close friends and family have helped me in countless ways over the past months, often in ways they may think small but collectively to me looms large. I want to express my appreciation for everyone's kinds thoughts, kind deeds, and what I'd characterize as goodness of spirit. Larry and I both appreciated it more than you might imagine. Instead of Ed the software engineer, I will pretend for just this one time to be Ed the poet. I'll express my thoughts in the form of a poem, and no, I won't give up my day job. Larry would be proud of that, I believe. He was most certainly a Truly Good Person.

The title of what I'll call the Truly Good Person poem resounds with the truth that underlies contradiction.

Goodness: The Eternally Transient Changing Constant

The goodness of spirit
and the spirit of goodness
are one and the same.

While theologians among us debate,
while rule followers and makers clash,
to all who behold,
it is clear when they look,
that goodness is manifest.
This is clear,
without faith,
without rules,
for there is manifest goodness wherever we look.

Be the manifestation of goodness,
and behold the manifestation of goodness in others.
Be the change that is good,
and behold the goodness of change.
Be the spirit of goodness,
the eternally transient, changing, constant.
Be a truly good person.

It's an important lesson for each of us: be a Truly Good Person for in doing so you will be loved and you will find peace. It's certainly clear to me that my social circle, which includes the Eclipse community, is rife with Truly Good People. You all know who you are and you should know that you are appreciated.

All Good Things

2009-04-10T06:13:00.004-05:00

All good things come to an end and Good Friday seems an apt day for endings. Eclipse has a great many contributors, not all of them well recognized. While many work in the foreground to make Eclipse what it is today, many more play important supporting roles in the background. Did you notice one of those background contributors in this picture from a previous blog?

I'll bet that when I said "It's important to keep in mind that although those in the foreground will tend to catch your eye, there's much more going on in the background than you might notice" you didn't take the hint to look more closely. If you had, you'd have seen Larry. As many of you know, he's been home since the beginning of February dying of cancer. He's been my guiding light for the past 27 years, so the girls and I did everything we could to make the end as dignified and comfortable as possible.

Today glioblastoma extinguished that light. Without him I might never have contributed to Eclipse and most certainly I would not have contributed as much. I don't use the word hate lightly, but I hate cancer and I despise glioblastoma for robbing his mind and then his life. Eclipse lost a significant contributor today and I lost something precious beyond measure. Thank goodness fond memories last a lifetime.

Value what you have while you have it because all good things come to an end.

Sharing: The Good Spirit of Open Source

2009-04-03T05:44:00.000-05:00

Sharing is a good thing. Every spring one of the good things the garden shares at the very start of the new season is the first snow drops. Their early arrival makes them special.

Open source too is fundamentally about sharing: the sharing of software. Earlier this week, Bjorn blogged about his personal view regarding "open source products." I agree, open source is not about products. It's about sharing what you create for free. Now there's a loaded word. In this case it means free as in freedom, i.e., the freedom to ignore anyone else in the universe who might take issue with what you shared with them for free. Hello? Did you noticed the $0 price tag dudes and dudets?! If you get nothing of value you've gotten exactly what you paid for. Of course everyone is more than free to be irrelevant as well. Ignoring the community is a most excellent way achieve irrelevance. Feel free!

In the end, the value of sharing is greatly enhanced when others partake. I'd like to think that when you share your software, you try---another loaded word; to try is a lie---to ensure that the things you share have "true value." Perhaps I project too much? Providing "true value" takes effort. It's a burden of responsibility not to be taken lightly. Life is a bounty but comes complete with a great many burdens that ought not to be taken lightly. Gardens, on the other hand share their bounty with no sense of obligation, like these crocuses, though the crocuses do anticipate pollinators will share their mobility.

When others use the software you share with them for free, they can help shoulder the burden of responsibility. They might shoulder it in recognition of the benefit received from sharing it for free in the first place. An excellent excellent example of that principle at work is seen in 270870. Achim Demelt shared his time and deep analytical insight to a cast light on a challenging technical problem. It's quite remarkable, and not just in my opinion. When you stop to consider that all the people and organizations in the community---those who have contributed and those who have not---all benefit from individuals like Achim sharing solutions to hard problems, you will have understood the true value of sharing in the context of open source. Social software indeed.

Surprising Things

2009-03-25T07:05:00.004-05:00

Life is full of surprises. Most are good though a few are not. Imagine my surprise to learn that my blogs are used to teach science to grade school children. I kid you not. I was trying to figure out the cause of the huge spike in the page views for my blog and discovered that a large number of referrals were coming from an online grade 6 science curriculum. The subject matter is "Interactions Between Living Things and Their Environment" and my posting titled Predation, Parasitism, Commensalism, and Mutualism in the Garden and in the Community apparently fits right in. The pond is starting to thaw and the robins are back, so I'll soon have more good stories and pretty pictures for the children.

It's better than "Where the Wild Things Are" around here! In fact, speaking of wild things and surprises, check out this video of the fox I shot just last week.

Given that I'm not at EclipseCon, you might be surprised to know that my stupid modeling talk has not been canceled. Peter has been staying at my place since the beginning of February and I spent a lot of that time convincing him of just how unbearably stupid modeling really is. Ruby really liked to make him feel comfortable while I droned on and on and on.

As a result of this long indoctrination period, Peter is fully prepared to pontificate about the excruciating obtuseness of modeling to a wider audience. I'm sure you'll enjoy being both enlightened and entertained.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2009-03-21T06:11:00.003-05:00

The Good

I'm very glad to be reelected to the Eclipse Board. It is a privilege to serve and an honor to get this vote of confidence from my peers.

Of course anything that promotes the use of models to drive software development is good, so I'm thrilled that Microsoft has created the M Specification Community, I'm honored to be involved as a charter member, and I'm flattered to be characterized as a key open source leader.

The Bad

I won't be able to make it to EclipseCon this year for the ugliest of personal reasons.

The Ugly

The grim reaper stalks my home to claim someone dear.

Thanks to all the people in the Eclipse community who have been so understanding and supportive during this most difficult period of my life, especially Peter and Mitch.

On Being a Scapegoat

2009-03-11T06:11:00.005-05:00

I've already blogged about the security problems caused by CDO and worse still, how CDO brought the world to its collective financial knees, but apparently the problems with modeling aren't isolated to that trouble making CDO component. Not at all! The problem seems to be a general Eclipse Modeling Framework shortcoming. It must be a fact because I just read about Microsoft's March Security Bulletin where the article makes it clear that "The problem stems from the way that the operating system parses and displays Windows Metafile- and Eclipse Modeling Framework-formatted image files." If that doesn't make your icicles shiver, nothing will!

Every community needs a scapegoat, so I say we pick on EMF. After all, if you have a really bad design, you can always blame EMF for generating it that way. Not only that, if you have really bad algorithms that perform poorly, you can always blame EMF for being bloated and slow. I've even heard that EMF isn't thread safe! Nothing distracts better than a scapegoat and EMF is really the ultimate scapegoat. If I'm reelected to the Eclipse board---you only have until Friday to vote for me---I promise to get to the bottom of this type of problem and root out the causes whomever they may be. No one will be safe from my careful scrutiny. We will reinstate public flogging to maintain order and discipline. Clearly I'm the no-nonsense candidate of choice.

The itemis Cloudsmith Eclipse Foundation Summit

2009-02-19T11:21:00.006-05:00

There was an itemis Cloudsmith Eclipse Foundation Summit at my place yesterday. Bjorn was the first dignitary to arrive and of course hooking into my high speed wireless network was the first priority.

Mitch Sonies arrived shortly before lunch so after hooking into the network we were ready for a meal.

We had a great many interesting discussions followed by some of my fine cooking for dinner. Too bad you weren't here.

Kim Horne: Diva of Design

2009-02-15T12:09:00.003-05:00

My office is graced by Kim Horne's original artistic master piece "Bumblebee Pollinates Lupine." She was inspired by one of my photos. I had her watercolor framed just this last week and now I've put in right above my monitor as a graphic reminder of the talented and generous people in the Eclipse community:

Ruby is in complete agreement that Kim Horne is truly a goddess of design. I'm eyeing Kim's latest creation with great fondness; it was also inspired by one of my photos. It's much nicer than the "Spider's Web" water color that you can see in the picture above.

I wonder if she'd be willing to part with it...

Wild Thoughts

2009-02-09T06:36:00.006-05:00

I learned last week that Amazon sales rankings are quite different for each country, so I was on the hunt for some interesting statistics about the second edition of the EMF book. These statistics change faster than underwear, so one needs to do a little screen grabbing to capture the moment. Apparently the EMF book was exceedingly popular in France on Saturday with these number one rankings:

By the time I clicked on the overall ranking in English books, I noticed that the EMF book was more popular than my favorite children's book!

I hope the EMF book isn't being used to lull children to sleep. Oh well, enough self promotion; it seems a little rampant these days. You might have noticed that the board elections have begun and that I'm a candidate. Of course I'm very busy digging up dirt to smear the other candidates because I believe we need a little more controversy and divisiveness in our close knit community. Not only that, there's nothing that improves one's relative stature quite as much as degrading the stature of others. You have to get up awfully early in the morning to fool scheming political hack like me!

I think Doug Gaff is particularly electable given that he's done such an excellent job for the committer community over the last year. I'd definitely vote for him, if I wasn't so completely self centered. He'll certainly need a lot of attention in my smear campaign. Speaking of highly electable people, I sure hope Mike Taylor is reelected as a sustaining members representative. His recent e4 survey is just one example of his proactive efforts to help the Eclipse community. I'm glad I don't need to smear him to get ahead.

The itemis EclipseSource Summit

2009-02-06T13:59:00.007-05:00

There was an itemis EclipseSource Summit at my house these past few days. Peter has been here since last Friday.

As with all important summits, the security for the dignitaries was tight, complete with trained guard dogs. Unfortunately one of them has grown inordinately fond of Chris, who arrived Wednesday, and has lost her killer instinct.

Jeff arrived last night, so I made one of my gourmet dinners for everyone. We had many stimulating conversations. Too bad you weren't here.

That being said, not everyone found the conversations equally stimulating.

Even with all the excitement this week, I found a bit of time to make a diagram of the e4 application model.

It's been a busy week.

Diversity: It's Essential

2009-01-26T07:44:00.005-05:00

As most of you know by now, I love diversity as the spice of life, so naturally I'm very pleased with how well how my new cichlid tank is doing. Wikipedia describes the cichlid family as "both large and diverse," just like the modeling community!

The diversity of EMF's documentation is improving as well. James Sugrue along with the fine folks at DZone helped to create a brand new refcard titled Essential EMF. I hope the community finds it useful. James will be doing a book review later in the week and there will be books available as prizes, so stay tuned. James and I make a fine pair, if I may say so myself.

Speaking of fine pairs, this Thursday Eike Stepper and I will be presenting a webinar about CDO. Attendees will be eligible to win a copy of the second edition of the book.

Mega Modeling Mania: The Sequel

2009-01-24T20:22:00.010-05:00

I'm feeling rather reflective these days. Is it merely coincidental that abstract reflection is one of the key aspects of modeling that makes it so powerful? Certainly the modeling community is vibrant, diverse, and rapidly growing, and that reflects well indeed!

EclipseCon will be an opportunity for the community to show its stunning colors.

I've proposed a BoF: Mega Modeling Mania: The Sequel. Last year's success simply screams for a sequel. With so much diversity, there's always an interesting new perspective.

It's important to keep in mind that although those in the foreground will tend to catch your eye, there's much more going on in the background, than you might notice.

There are many ways to look at any one particular thing, so a BoF will be a perfect place to look at familiar things from a surprising perspective.

You might learn something from seeing old things in a new way.

The EMF Ultra Slim Diet

2009-01-18T07:18:00.008-05:00

Are your objects feeling bloated? When you look in the memory analyzer, do unsightly bulges around the heap upset you? Do embarrassing OutOfMemory exceptions mar your social life? Well hide in shame no longer. With the new EMF Ultra Slim diet, you can quickly shed those unwanted bytes to a reveal a new and slimmer you. That's right, this is not a gimmick. Go to your GenModel now, find the "Root Extends Class" property, and enter the special promotional code below.

Then regenerate your model, sit back, relax, and let EMF do all the work. Unlike other fad diets, with EMF Ultra Slim, there is no risk of nausea, hair loss, depression, insanity, or premature death because no drugs are involved. Of course smaller objects have to work harder to get the same job done, so you may experience a small decrease in performance. If this disturbs you in the slightest, immediately stop the treatment, or better yet, take the steps outlined below to allocate the fields you really need to get the most out of life.

Please note that Ecore itself has taken the EMF Ultra Slim challenge so extenders of Ecore may notice that the eContainerFeatureID has disappeared, unless of course they too take the EMF Ultra Slim challenge themselves, in which case, references to this field will vanish along with the unsightly extra bytes it consumed. If this disturbs you, recall that I've repeatedly explained that extending Ecore is done at your own risk because binary compatibility of the implementation classes is not guaranteed. If you're feeling inclined to complain about that, please address all correspondence to Hello!@DoILookLikeICare?.com and prepare for a long wait because you're more likely to see the moss in this picture grow than to get a response.

How does this copyrighted new miracle treatment work without the aid of drugs? The wonders of open source reveals all. MinimalEObjectImpl has only two fields: an int eFlags field and an Object eStorage field; they are private, so I can change them in the future. The flags field is used to represent three things: whether notifications should be delivered, the container feature ID, as well as bits to indicate what's in the storage field. It's designed so that the field needs no initialization, i.e., the default value of 0 represents the correct ground state. Additional values, such as the container, adapters, dynamic class, dynamic settings, proxy URI, and resource are maintained in the storage field. If only one such value is needed, it's stored directly in the storage field. If more than one is needed, an array of objects is allocated to hold all the required values.

But wait, there's more! The adapters list is no longer stored as a list. It's stored as an array with a wrapper list being allocated only as needed. Not only that, if this array has the same contents as that of the container, the array of the container is shared. This fits very nicely with a common pattern of usage where all objects in a containment tree share the same adapters. It's a thing of beauty.

So what if you decide really want a field all the time for some specific value because you know your objects will always have it and you'd like the storage field itself not to end up allocating an array to hold multiple values. Worry not. By overriding two or three simple methods in your derived class, you can make that design choice yourself. The nested Container class of MinimalEObjectImpl does exactly that, i.e., it allocates a field to store the container. After all, most objects are contained by other objects so having a field for this is a good thing.

So what will this fantastic new therapy cost you? Not a penny, just the time it takes for one simple treatment. Of course generous donations to Eclipse will be most welcome. Don't forget to mention EMF Ultra Slim when professing your undying gratitude to Eclipse; in addition to a fast mirror, you'll receive a special reusable "fast help" coupon that you can use in the EMF newsgroup. As a footnote, MinimalEObjectImpl is the very first file I've ever committed that actually contains my name: "Copyright (c) 2009 Ed Merks and others."

With Modeling the Sky's the Limit

2009-01-14T12:49:00.011-05:00

Models give you the freedom to soar effortlessly.

Modeling is universally applicable in all fields of engineering. I'll bet, for example, that the plane above was modeled in software before anyone actually built a physical model of it. Given its universal applicability, it's no surprise to see the rapidly growing range of software applications that are driven by models.

An excellent example of model driven software development in practice is Skyway Builder. I have always found it particularly odd that more hasn't been done in the past to exploit modeling in the web space. For some strange reason, although modeling is often used to help build the tools and runtimes, it isn't often surfaced as a useful concept in and of itself by those tools and runtimes. I suppose that's much like OSGi being used to build JEE servers, and then being hidden by them. However, given that XML Schema is a modeling language, it's somewhat more inexplicable.

Not only does Skyway Builder make heavy use of EMF and GMF to build its tool infrastructure, much like Web Tools does, it also surfaces various powerful domain-specific models to the end-users who exploit them to design web applications declaratively and graphically. The design captured in the various models is employed to generate the actual application using JET.

This approach provides clients with a better long-term investment because their designs are captured in a high-level way that can be reused in the future as the underlying web application space continues to shift in unexpected directions.

Of particular interest in the upcoming version is the new two-way mapping between Skyway and UML. They've recorded a short video showing the technology in action. It highlights the integration with Rational Software Architect, but more relevant to the Eclipse modeling crowd, the technology itself works directly with open source UML, the basis for RSA. Even from that perspective, it's a great example of how Eclipse helps disparate organizations better integrate their tools with the help of common underlying models. With modeling, the sky's the limit.

For me personally, it's gratifying to see Eclipse's modeling technology used not only to build all this cool stuff, but more so to see integration with UML and, most important of all, to see the model driven software development concepts embodied by Eclipse reflected back in the Skyway user's experience. For example, the round-trip engineering between UML and Skyway is just like the two-way mapping between Ecore and UML, so of course I'm going to like it! It's clear that modeling isn't just great for building tools and runtimes, it's also valuable directly to the end users, even in the web space.

Wordle is Better Than Tea Leaves!

2009-01-10T05:12:00.018-05:00

Kenn's recent blog inspired me to create a Wordle representation of my own blog. What a great way to kill time in the most pointless possible way. If you suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder, repeated clicks of Ctrl+R will provide endless satisfaction; beware of infinite loops though. Best of all, if you stare at the results for a while, suddenly you'll realize it's like reading tea leaves, only simpler because you can actually read the words.

If you look closely at this particular result, you'll realize just how insightful it is when it reveals that Eclipse gave life

to a really important open community centered around people

where there is always much that is new!

Of course it's not surprising to find a great modeling platform.

Nor is it shocking to find discover that the generated model code is just excellent.

Of course we know that Ecore and EMF are closely associated, but look at how nicely p2 fits in!

In the end, it's clear that you can totally provide for your business needs better at Eclipse

because at Eclipse, we focus on developers,

and you can always count on getting help now!

Not only that, Eclipse provides source for everything

so we can make the common conclusion

that the world is good.

What kind of hidden messages does a wordle analysis of your writings reveal?

It's a Matter of Perspective

2009-01-01T08:23:00.009-05:00

Have you ever noticed how much changes depending on your point of view?

Even just a very slight change of perspective can make a significant difference.

As such, two people looking at the same thing from different view points will actually see different things.

They might argue about how it's possible that other people sees things differently.

While it's so clearly green for one person...

It's so obviously blue to another.

It's best to keep this in mind when arguing about perceptions. Try to take a very close look from every point of view you can imagine.

Only then will you see reality as it actually is: a diversity of shifting sizes, shapes, textures, and colors strongly influenced by the eye of the beholder.

It's Here, it's Finally Here!

2008-12-29T13:09:00.003-05:00

The second edition of the EMF book physically arrived at my doorstep today! Here she is, modeling her new improved jacket with the Ecore Tools diagram of the Ecore model as a backdrop.

What a stunningly fashionable combination! With almost twice as much meaty content that's more than twice as excellent as the last edition, I expect it will be all the rage in the new year. According to Amazon, if you order today, it will still arrive in time to ring in the new year on Wednesday night. We live in a world of instant gratification...

Eclipse Banking Day in New York

2008-12-10T12:36:00.031-05:00

On Monday I was headed for New York a day ahead of the Eclipse New York Banking Day event. I whipped out my camera as we approached Manhattan.

I haven't been to New York in more than a decade. Welcome to the Big Apple!

I grabbed a taxi and was soon in the mid island tunnel headed for my stay at the Stay hotel.

The hotel was very reasonably priced, had nice rooms, and some funky decor in the lobby.

After dinner, I walked around to see some of the sights. New York is a very lively city and there is a great deal to see. Too bad I didn't have more time to spend here.

On Tuesday, Ian started the day with a quick overview of the agenda and expressed gratitude to the sponsors, Actuate and Sybase, as well as to Ted Epstein of Morgan Stanley for hosting the meeting with excellent facilities.

Next Mike provided a high-level overview of what's happening at Eclipse these days
and why there is value in getting involved.

He talked about the following maturity model for how organizations deal with open source.

Business agility---responding quickly to changing regulations, standards, and customer opportunities---is becoming increasingly important. Today's information technology solutions tend to result in technology silos that are poorly integrated and plagued by vendor lock-in. Eclipse offers a new approach: open collaborative development. It has established best practices for multi-organization collaboration, including development processes, intellectual property sharing, technical architecture, and sound governance. Defining a platform in open source with transparent processes that are focused on meritocracy will definitely encourage many pragmatic people to get involved to share their innovations. Businesses should focus on where they can offer competitive differentiation. There's too much effort going into building the whole enchilada in today's complex world, and that effort detracts from being able to focus on the important factors that would actually provide better value for in terms of specific business needs. Defining and implementing a common banking platform would help the industry as a whole move beyond it's current cyclic reinventing of the wheel.

Next Jochen Krause talked about e4 and where Eclipse as a platform is headed.

One of the tool challenges we all face today is how best to make developers productive with quick write-test-debug cycles while producing modular componetized applications with consistent and stable APIs. The mission of e4 is to build a next-generation platform for pervasive, component-based applications and tools. It's very important to reassure the established community that the 3.x stream will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future. Eclipse has been growing for many years, but nothing has ever disappeared, so there are often multiple ways to do the same thing, e.g., storing preferences. Some cleanup is required. He talked about the effort to model the workbench so the same type of technology folks are using to model data within their specific domains will be used directly in the platform to model the workbench. For the future, we should anticipate the browser becoming a more viable delivery vehicle for applications.

Andrew Montalenti and Ted Epstein described MODeX, Model Oriented Data eXchange, which is a graphical modeling IDE that includes a code generator, language-specific runtime components, and life cycle management tools.

Direct XML manipulation is the least common denominator in the message exchange space. Toolkits focus on SOAP envelopes, transport, and message dispatching and handling. XML Schema is something that's often ignored, or treated as only a design time thing that's not properly maintained. Developers have been left to manually translate business concepts into XML formats with issues like poor support non-containment references getting in the way. Their solution is to have developers focus at a higher level of abstraction and to generate schemas and other detailed low-level artifacts from well-defined abstract message contracts.

Andrew gave a demo of MODeX designer, which uses GEF, EMF, GMF, JFace/SWT, and Equinox, and showed how to design entities, which he compared to EClasses in Ecore, using the tool. It supports tree-based editing as well as a graphical view of the entity relationship diagram. The user can create multiple different graphical views of the same underlying model. He showed all the different things they can generate including Java, C#, and C++, as well as schemas and described how some of these generated things can be used. MODeX includes support for views that allow you to filter down the overall model to the relevant information actually needed in a particular context; the corresponding schemas for these filtered views are generated automatically. They don't yet have a good graphical representation for views, but they plan to provide that soon. MODeX is yet another extremely cool example of how powerful model driven development can be in any domain.

In his talk, Christian Meier briefly described UBS' experience with Business Capability Modeling, which involves apply modeling to abstract over existing business processes, technologies, and organizational structure.

Philipp Kutter quickly outlined the EMF model they've designed to capture all this high level information.

Tatyana Staver gave a short talk about the Eclipse Open Financial Markets Platform, which is focused on creating a middle office financial markets application.

She reiterated the earlier theme about avoiding the continuous reinvention of the wheel that we see all over our industry. Build a platform and do it right once. Then evolve it and benefit from the expertise and contributions of others.

Edwin Park shared RBC's experience with Front Office Fixed Income Application Integration.

In the past, trading applications were localized to specific product types so there were multiple applications doing much the same thing. It would be more more effective to have one integrated user interface that could be tailored to address all the specific needs. A componentized architecture is ideal for providing a common base and allowing specializations to be seamlessly integrated. The fact that Eclipse already provides a rich variety of useful of components is a big win. They're making use of p2 to help with making installation a snap. The shift from monolithic solutions to component-oriented solutions is a big organizational shift: there is more reliance on shared infrastructure and that requires better coordination across larger groups of people. Internally their development effort follows much the same process as Eclipse itself uses: they focus on addressing real immediate needs and involve others in realizing the solutions. He stressed that it's important to get management buy-in for investing in shared technology projects.

Next was my turn fo the EMF dog-and-pony show. First I took pictures of the audience.

Notice below that the monitor is showing a screen saver of my garden? I started by explaining that I was going to jump to the conclusion. I pointed out that this beautiful garden was modeled first, on grid paper, before I went out and landscaped it. The conclusion being that it's important to model first, and take action in light of that design, if you want to achieve a beautiful result.

In this picture you can see in the monitor a picture of me taking a picture. You got to like that!

I think it went well. Almost no one fell asleep, and even the one guy who did, didn't snore very loud.

After a break, Jochen Krause talked about how RAP extends Eclipse RCP to the web.

The idea of course is to have a single code base that supports both RCP and the web. Just shoehorning an RCP window into the browser didn't go over so well though, so there was an effort to map the UI in a more browser-friendly way. I totally perked up when he said that cell editors are working the latest version of RAP. Woo hoo, now it can support properties views as used by an EMF generated editor.

Finally Henrik Lindberg of Cloudsmith and Jeff McAffer of Eclipse Source described Provisioning Eclipse in the Enterprise.

Of course p2 is the focal point for this. Unzipping files just doesn't cut it and the old style update manager, which p2 replaces, had many limitations. The installable unit, or IU, is the star of this new show; everything is an IU and everything is installable. With p2, a key design point is the separation of the metadata from the artifacts for which they provide information. The overall design is based on a director for managing the metadata, a repository for managing the artifacts, touchpoints for managing the runtime targets, and an engine to produce profiles or runnable configurations. Suffice to say, p2 is an installer on steroids.

The banking day was a great success. Kudos to Ian for helping organize this, to the sponsors for helping fund it, and for to Morgan Stanley for being such excellent hosts! It was a great event and it was very nice to meet so many interesting people. For example, I ran into Jeff Ricker whose name I recognized from the EMF newsgroup.

After that, Jochen, Mitch, Jeff and I headed to JFK for our 8:15PM flight to San Francisco for the Eclipse board meeting.

I didn't arrive at my hotel until well after 1:00AM PST, so it was a very long but productive day.

The Church of the Holy Metamodel

2008-12-05T15:11:00.008-05:00

I knew it was only a matter of time because I've been seeing various ominous signs. Celestial bodies are moving into an unusual alignment.

So it didn't surprise me in the least when Father Ralph Müller, one of EMF's many zealots, err, I mean disciples, came to me with a story about hearing voices that he believes were from a supreme being. It might actually have been His Holiness Mike Milinkovich, but in my fanatic, err, I mean learned, opinion, that's close enough. The gospel according to Ralph is that God uses EMF. Now this should really come as no surprise to anyone---of course any self-respecting designer would model their creations first---but it's nevertheless a startling revelation to many. It really begs for the creation of the Church of the Holy Metamodel; I'm writing the Eclipse project proposal for it now. We will enshrine Ecore as the fundamentalist's pure self-describing model that binds all creation under unity. Feeling totally inspired, Sister Amber went out on a pilgrimage in search of visions, or perhaps for a nice place to make yellow snow; everyone is inspired in their own way.

The timing could not have been better, because Brother Dave Steinberg has been working tirelessly in seclusion on The Really New Testament, also known affectionately as the second edition of the EMF book. He just completed this sacred task. His compilation about the life and times of Ecore will be unveiled December 24; order now because you won't find a free copy in every hotel. It's is a delectable compelling morsel you definitely don't want to overlook.

To kick start our new church, we began with a good old fashioned purging; nothing brings a community together like a witch hunt. Our witch was called SDO, a tainted offshoot of Ecore we'd all like to forget, so we scratched it from our history books. We're definitely feeling much better now that the SDOectomy is behind us. A little sprinkling of holy water along with a heart-rending blessing from Brother Nick, and the exorcism is done.

Though not as astounding as Ralph's revelation, I had an amazing, almost miraculous, experience of my own: I went out to the car this week and found this stunning revelation on the license plate of my very own car!

I believe this to be a sign calling for me to preach the holy word according to modeling. To make a fresh start, one of the ancient practices I'm thinking of reviving---you just don't hear enough about it these days---is shunning. Like witch hunts, it's a great community building experience; not so great for the witches of course, but hey, there are only a few of them and many of us, so it's for the greater good. I'm just not sure whom to shun first, so I'm open to suggestions.

Modeling: Too Much of a Good Thing

2008-12-02T14:25:00.010-05:00

With the EclipseCon Program Committee meeting scheduled for 10:00AM this morning, I finally had to grab the bull by the horns.

That is, I needed to review all the EclipseCon 2009 modeling submissions before the meeting. There are 11 tutorial proposals, but only 2 slots as well as 20 long talks, but only 4 slots; I'm in the awkward position of having to consider my own stupid modeling talk among the candidates. Assuming we divide our 4 hours of short talks so half the time are 30 minute slots and the other half are 10 minutes slots, we have 20 30 minutes talks but only 4 slots and 8 10 minute talks for 10 slots. We clearly have enough excellent material to fill a whole track for a whole week. I know it's been said that too much of a good thing can be wonderful, but it seems that a great many people are going to be very disappointed. Oh well, it's a bridge we're going to have to cross, like it or not.

Of course my first approach will be to whine for more slots, but whining will only get you so far, even though I'm very good at it! Few can snivel as well as me and I'll have Rich Gronback to help me. Personally I think it's time for an Eclipse Modeling Summit; Hawaii would be nice. Assuming that whining will get us only so far and that Eclipse Modeling Summit won't happen any time soon, I'm left wondering how best to make decisions. For example, will attendees want an EMF and a GMF tutorial, or will they want different cool things that haven't been offered before? If you have opinions, please feel free to spout them.

No matter what, rejecting proposals won't make any new friends I'm sure, so it's good that at Eclipse I can buy frienship. Apparently friendship requires long term maintenance though. I was the 2nd donor as well as the 400th. I really like the high speed download mirror.

Modeling Pilgrimage to France

2008-11-28T08:24:00.022-05:00

Paris by the light of day on Sunday did not disappoint. It is by far the most magnificent city I've ever seen. The beautiful sights are simply endless and grand entrances are the norm.

Imagine living here!

I was surprised to see snow in Paris on Sunday, but by afternoon it had turned to rain and I was on my way to Nantes with Stéphane Lacrampe as my host and guide. That night I stayed at his house, which is conveniently located very close to the railway station. It's currently being renovated and will be very nice when it's complete. He even has a funky courtyard-style back yard full of fruit trees!

On Monday morning we headed for the Obeo office on Stéphane's motor scooter. That was fun! Of course no pilgrimage to France is complete without a trip to a cathedral, so we stopped by the Cathedral of Nantes. Coincidentally, two weeks ago I finished reading the book "Pillars of the Earth" that Karsten Thoms bought for me on my previous trip to Lünen---a most excellent book---so I have developed a special appreciation for the architecture of a cathedral. It simply boggles the mind that such structures could be built without all the modern technology we have available today.

It's a real testament to the persistence of human nature and the creativity of the human mind to see such wondrous things. I've always had a particular fondness of colorful glass.

I suppose its hubris to compare the things we collectively create at Eclipse to such marvels, but if you consider the staggering complexity and number of people involved, it's not completely unreasonable.

Visiting Obeo was much like visiting itemis last month; so many happy friendly people excited to be working together on cool technology. Here they are all gathered for coffee and pastries in a new office space that they're currently setting up. Do you recognize any faces?

I spent much of the day with Jonathan Musset and Cédric Brun learning about what they're doing in open source as well as about some of their Acceleo technology; Cédric gave me that box of chocolates he promised long ago! Obeo has very cool traceability support in their products that I'd love to see for EMF's generator. E.g., you would be able to click on a structural feature and it would show you all the Java things generated from that feature. They've also have been doing some really cool work on a model for describing forms. I encouraged them to write a project proposal so we can reach out to all the interested parties; that conversation is now well underway.

Like the itemis founders, the Obeo founders are refreshingly open minded and forward thinking. They were recently featured in this French paper:

We talked quite a bit too about how to promote modeling in France and how to get the French modeling community more integrated with the modeling community abroad. The German community has been a little more well-integrated I think. Language barriers are an unfortunate fact of life.

On Monday night I stayed at Etienne Juliot's house. It was very sociable. I tried to read a picture book for his daughter, but we seemed to disagree on the words. She would insist, for example, that an apple is really a pomme and was not impressed by the fact that I seemed to be making up new words on the fly. She was too cute.

We had to get up at 4:30 so we could catch the 5:30 train to Paris; yet another sleep deprived night. I was warned that a rush hour ride on the Paris Metro would be an "experience" and it certainly was. How many French people can you cram into a subway car? MD Day was held at that the Arche de la Défense which was totally spectacular. Check out this view of the Arc de Triomphe from under La Grande Arche.

Look what you can do with a little zoom and a lot of mega pixels.

The turnout at MD Day was very large, approximately 260 people I believe. That's Stéphane in the front left.

All the talks, except mine, were in French so I just hung out all day to chat with people. Jean Bezivin was there chatting with Patric Albert of ILOG, one of IBM's most recent acquisitions, so we discussed a bit of the interesting things ILOG is considering doing in open source at Eclipse. I also ran into Olivier Moises again, so we had more time to chat about Wazaabi and how it relates to the Presentation Modeling Framework proposal that's currently under discussion. He introduced me to Cédric Vidal of ProxiAD who has been working on a simple style-sheet approach to transforming models in his spare time; that immediately made me think about how useful what he's doing would be for e4. I encouraged him to get involved.

Meanwhile, Etienne was manning the Obeo booth where he demonstrated their technology to a steady stream of visitors.

One of the highlights for me was when Steve Sfartz introduced me to Jean-Marc Prieur who spent almost an hour providing a personalized demonstration of Microsoft graphical DSL tools in action.

It was very interesting to see this technology in action and it was extremely nice that I had the time to ask many detailed technical questions. The graphical DSL technology is based on a CMOF-like meta model; Jean-Marc explained that he considers it far simpler than MOF. I say it's CMOF-like because associations are first class objects and, at least by default, association classes (or link classes) are generated much like what I blogged about for modeling associations with Ecore. In addition to the domain meta model, there is also a model for describing the desired graphical editing support and of course the two are mapped to bind the domain onto the desired graphical editor. It's also possible to specify the desired XML serialization; though I'm not sure XMI is supported. Their UML technology is built on this stack. All in all, it's very much like GMF though with significantly more end-user polish.

We also talked about Oslo, Microsoft's more recent textual DSL effort. While the graphical DSL effort is primarily focused on code generation, graphical editing, and XML serialization, the textual DSL project has a different domain meta model, i.e., MSchema, and is primarily focused on runtimes, reflection, and textual serialization. You can compare the graphical DSL project to generated EMF augmented by GMF; as far as I understand it, the domain meta model exists only at development time, not at runtime, so there is no MOF-like reflection support. You can compare the textual DSL technology to Xtext (i.e., MGrammar), Ecore (i.e., MSchema), and EObject (i.e., MGraph). So while at Eclipse we provide Ecore as the common standards-based meta model (i.e., OMG EMOF) to support both graphical and textual DSLs and hence provide model-based reflection for all domain models, at Microsoft there are two different technologies to cover these two aspects.

My stupid modeling talk at the end of the day was very well received. People even cheered when I described XML as a poor excuse for human readable syntax that was designed primarily with machine- not human-readability in mind and that has so much appeal largely because lazy developers can avoid writing lexers and parsers. The message that UML is not equal to modeling was also well received. It's of course particularly gratifying to be preaching to the converted! It was a very long day so I was happy to head back to the hotel. When I checked my email, Dave informed me that the EMF book is finally done! It will be in warehouses on Dec 24th, so order your copy now before they all sell out!!

The next day, I had time for a little more sight seeing. Who would have thought we'd find a Canadian pub in Paris?

The Notre-Dame Cathedral was magnificent.

There were a great many amazing fountains.

Occasionally the old and the new stood together in sharp contrast.

Larry and I had a great dinner with a bottle of very fine French wine to end our day and our trip. In the morning it was time to head for home, where there was 10 cm of snow to greet us. Oh well, the girls certainly gave us a warm welcome home, even if the weather didn't.

Eclipse Summit Europe: Afterwards

2008-11-22T17:25:00.007-05:00

I was too tired on Friday to blog about the things I did. Chris, Ian, Larry, and I attended the Ludswigburg demo camp, which was very interesting, well attended by nice people, and well hosted. Sampling many different kinds of vodka really wears a guy out!

Today Larry and I headed for Paris where I'm staying at Saint Paul Le Marais. It's really pretty here!

And they have really big doors!!

We'll have more time for sightseeing tomorrow before I head out to Nantes Sunday night.

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008: The Automotive Working Group Meeting Afterwards

2008-11-21T10:17:00.019-05:00

I held off publishing this blog about the automotive working group meeting that was held after Eclipse Summit Europe so that discussions could continue quietly in the background. However, given that Ralph let the cat out of the bag, I thought folks might be interested in what happened at that first meeting back in November...

My day started with breakfast with Mike, Ian, Doug, and Ralph. Then we headed by train to the Bosch site where the meeting was hosted. There was quite a large turn-out for the group, 22 in all.

Mike presented first, reviewing the history that led to the creation of the Eclipse Foundation as an independent entity.

According to Evans Data, there are 4 million developers using Eclipse daily, and 6 million if you include the vendor based products built on Eclipse. In Eclipse 1.0, Eclipse was primary just a Java IDE. For 2.0, it evolved to become a generalized tools integration platform. For 3.0, with Rich Client Platform, it evolved to come a desktop application integration platform. Today, Eclipse and Microsoft are the two dominant tools platforms.

A key to the Eclipse platforms success is the uniform component model that puts all contributions on an equal footing and make it easier to add little things or big things to the application. Open APIs and a commercially friendly licenses help to lower the barrier to entry. Eclipse has established proven best-practice processes around these ideas and these can be reused by industry vertical working groups to get a jump start on getting up and running. The maturity of an organization's policy around open source tends to progress from deny, use, contribute, champion, and finally value co-creation.

Doug Gaff presented on CDT, DSDP, and the lessons learned about working collaboratively in open source.

CDT has evolved to become an extremely high quality popular C/C++ IDE. It's used for things like embedded, linux, and high performance computing. DSDP is a container project for embedded and mobile technology. There are now more than 40 committers from 11 companies. There is support for debugging of embedded devices which features things like memory rendering. as well as target management that includes a remote systems explorer and a framework for managing communication with the targets. Real-time software components, Tools for Mobile Linux, Native Application Builder, Mobile Tools for Java and a proposal for FireFly, a Mobile Web Devleopment Kit targeting iPhone and other devices, rounds off the slate. Much of this technology is very likely to be applicable in the automotive industry.

Then it was my turn to do the 20 minute modeling dog and pony show; check out the conformance to Ralph's dress code!

Next Ralph presented some background about TOPCASED, a French consortium focused on building world-class open source modeling technology.

Two mistakes they admit to making: they focused too narrowly only on the aerospace industry,
and they focused too narrowly only in France. Both limited adoption. Of course many of these people are now committers at Eclipse on projects like Ecore Tools and Papyrus.

After a coffee break we had a round table introduction and some initial position discussions. Stefan Ferber of Bosch, drove home the point that it's very important to manage diverse groups of people who are often split geographically across different countries. The tool expenses are growing out of hand and that's primarily caused by inefficiencies in the system and with shrinking budgets are no longer affordable. Something needs to be done to make the tool vendors more efficient and Bosch is highly motivated to forge a new path.

Ulrich Schopf also of Bosch talked about some of the efficiencies they've focused on in the past,
e.g., the unification of the tool chain around gas and diesel engines.

Ramy Asselin of General Motors was able to attend following an AUTOSAR meeting.

He's currently working on a master's degree. Their goal is to arrive at a single tool set and processes based on open data where both the tools and data evolve over time. They definitely intend to leverage AUTOSAR. The software in vehicles is growing in complexity faster than is the capacity growing to accommodate that.

They need to improve sharing and integration and need to manage better the impact of design changes.

Thomas Hermes of IAV talked about the tools they need being too expensive, full of features they don't need, but for which they pay, and yet missing specific features they really do need. They'd prefer to see more componentized tools into which they could contribute the things they need. They don't care about tools, only about the results they get from those tools.

Hans Kugler helps other people improve the way they manage the software process. The improvements needed by the car industry is needed across the whole ecosystem; improvements within individual organizations won't suffice for the kinds of problems we are seeing. He definitely encourages the development of a common platform as a drive toward huge cost savings measure as well as something to foster more innovation.

Axel Schultze of IAV talked about how everywhere they go they run into customers with customized processes. It's very inefficient for them to have so little commonality of tool reuse across their customer base. Lack of tools around the system architecture of a car it painful as well. He mentioned their involvement in AUTOSAR which he sees as a good start, but perhaps not sufficient. License costs have become prohibitive because as much as 15% of a developer's cost is attributed to the cost of the tools.

Nest Wolfgang Neuhaus of itemis talked about his interests in this space. Itemis is heavily involved in providing help to develop domain specific languages in the embedded space. He asserts that an open tool platform will inevitably exist, so it's primarily a question of what form will it take, and who will get involved to drive the direction. Itemis recognized this inevitable end result as evidenced by they fact that it has open sourcing all its tools and technologies.

Martin Thomas of Bosch mentioned the gas and diesel tool chain unification as an example of the kind of cost savings that are needed. He considers Artop too closed in its current form. AUTOSAR is very important and he wants to see an open source project around this. The current effort is far too closed and will not produce the type of open ecosystem that's needed. He repeated my think big but start small, which I'd earlier termed as start small but aim high.

Markus Utz of Bosch reiterated some of the themes about how the current cost structure is stifling innovation. He too wants to work together with others.

Martin Richter of IAV talked again about the plethora of OEM development environments. It's just too painful and wasteful.

Peter Horn of Intel talked about why they are doing tools. Primarily they want to ensure that there is a good tool set available for people to exploit Intel's chips and hence improve the uptake.
They have good compilers, for example, that typically have 20% performance improvements over gcc. Faster code makes their chips seem faster. They want there to be a full tool chain that best exploits the silicon and are interested in the automotive industry's specific requirements.

Joerg Zimmer of BMW is interest in seeing a solid tool chain. Lutz Rothhardt also of BMW talked about how to manage all the different controllers in a vehicle. Their mirror, for example, has 5 or 6 inputs to decide whether to heat the mirror. It's gotten to be too complex to manage the dependencies between all the components for the purposes of change impact analysis. Even gathering the data within their organization is far too complex. The costs of a mistake in a shipped vehicle is extremely high. They want to see vendors competing so they don't become complacent but rather continue to focus on quality and innovation to maintain their position.

Michael Rudorfer of ARTOP talked about their development efforts around AUTOSAR.

They see a need for a common AUTOSAR model upon which to build tools to foster better interoperability. AUTOSAR's license restricts disclosure of the specification to members only, which effectively blocks the ability to turn it into an open source project. So they're trying to be open, but can only be open within the membership. The theme here is much like that I described earlier, i.e., building a common model and then encouraging tool vendors to compete in providing the best tools around that model, and to add specialized complimentary add-ons to any tool. They are currently working to build an EMF-based model, which was the topic of some conversations I had yesterday that ESE.

Minoru Okada of Dendso talked about his role in process development which is made more difficult by the lack of a coherent tool chain. It's often far too difficult to chain tools properly. He pointed out that the Japanese automotive software industry is many years behind and is simply not familiar with Eclipse.

Martin Beckel is from Continental, which was big in things like tires, but they've grown by acquisition and have ended up with a diverse set of tools; this type of diversity is not the good kind! They need to unify this. Exchanging software components is way too big a task, so they badly need something to integrate easily the various software components they reply upon. They're also involved in TOPCASED and Artop, so they're well aware of the benefits of collaboration. Even when there are good commercial tools, those often don't integrate with Eclipse nor with each other.

Nils Nilson of Johnson Controls repeated the concern about islands of tools; there really need to be bridges. Collectively there are a huge number of people with good ideas so doing work collectively will be a huge improvement.

Ralph summarized some of the issues and then Mike talked about some steps we could take to build an ecosystem on a well defined platform.

The first step might be to define an Eclipse package that assembles some of the key pieces of Eclipse that are expected to be of ubiquitous use, e.g., CDT, parts of DSDP, and EMF. This would establish a straw man base line. It would certainly start sending the right signals; tool vendors and the AUTOSAR folks are likely to take note. This starts to create an ecosystem with empty niches just waiting to be filled. Surprising players will turn up and do surprising things; that's what innovation is all about. It's important to define a roadmap, spell out the requirements wishlist, and sketch a viable business and governance model around all this.

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008: Day Two

2008-11-20T18:28:00.005-05:00

The day started with David Wood talking about the Symbian decision to become open source.

Fragmentation caused by too many mobile operating systems dilutes the industry's effort while open source helps to create a more successful, cohesive, productive community. Stability and quality of the base, agility in responding to changing needs, and a growing base of skilled developers are key aspects to a platform's success. Open source lowers barriers to entry, but it's not a panacea because integration and cohesion are always a challenge, and fragmentation is always a risk and in fact open source makes that risk more likely. A copyleft license like Eclipse Public License helps avoid that, though it's not always possible to consume the changes external parties make to the base. A very large number of companies have signed up to participate in this system. Good luck Symbian!

After that is was time for my stupid modeling talk. By the way, did you notice that in Ian's blog, all the people talked about modeling, even Doug Gaff? Resistance is futile. As I tried to bring up my screen on the projector, my computer decided to go to lala land so I had to power down and reboot. There's nothing quite like an untimely technical failure (like there's ever a timely one!) to get a guy off to a great start. Oh well, I think it went very well, judging by the comments I got afterward.

After the meeting I had a chat with Axel Rittershaus of Skyway Software.

He really liked my talk and we speculated about the various reasons why there are so very many misconceptions around modeling. Skyway uses EMF to help build their tools and models and those in turn are helping their end-users generate web applications. There's meta in action for you!

After that I chatted with Cameron Bateman of Oracle.

I've chatted with him a few times on IRC's #eclipse-modeling, so it was especially nice to get to meet him in person. We chatted about how best to sync up a model and a DOM and about rendering something that's better than the ugly properties view we have right now. It's great working with enthusiastic people with a can-do attitude.

I was chatting with so many people, I missed the Ecore Tools talk and the Tom Schindl's talk. That made me really sad, especially when everyone told me they were both really good. Darned ESE is too short so there's not enough time to do everything. I also spent time with Stefan Eberle chatting about the AUTOSAR implementation he's working on. I should have taken more pictures; yet more brain failure. Then I missed Rich's Amalgamation talk. Double darn. I'm going to have to cut some of those conversations short next year, because before I knew it, the summit was over after short wrap-up at 5:00.

For dinner I went out with some of the board members and some of the folks considering the possibility of starting an automotive working group. We meet with them tomorrow early, and I still don't have my slides ready. I'd best get to it!

2008-11-19T18:18:00.018-05:00

Dave Thomas' keynote focused on the history and future of embedded devices though much of what he explained was around the fact that what we do at Eclipse generally sucks.

In particular, Java sucks, frameworks suck, modeling sucks big time, and hence Eclipse as a whole is a complex disaster. Those sound like fighting words! He expressed dismay that EMF made modeling marginally successful otherwise modeling would have just died off long ago. I almost felt kind of guilty, until he got to the part about Domain Specific Languages being a solution to all this complexity. Hey, isn't that what modeling will help develop? I noticed that his misconceptions will be fully addressed by my talk tomorrow.

After that I attended Tonny Madsen's talk about implementing screen flows in RCP applications; he's from The RCP Company.

He explained some of the problems related to flow control in wizards and described the simpler screen flow approach he's advocating. He showed some of his cool tools for designing flows.

Benoit Langlois of Thales talked about SolFa, i.e., a solution factory for integrating components in the software generation processes.

A factory component is a unit of generation with a clear objective and a well defined contract based on view points. They are orchestrated into an overall assembled plan. It needs to bridge the gap between the flexible control desired by the users and the technical precision needed by the provider of the services. His case study example showed how SolFa can be used to orchestrate the EMF's generation process. It's interesting how SolFa makes EMF's rigid generation process more flexible by making it easily configurable as part of an overall generation plan. Much of what we have hard-coded in Java in our generator adapters can instead be orchestrated by what's effectively a SolFA DSL for that. Very cool stuff!

Next Quentin Glineur described how ATL can be used to transform EMF models in a declarative way.

It can directly operate on an instance to modify it, i.e., to implement transformations such as refactoring. Constraints can be applied to ensure that a transformation produces results that conform to expectations. Its declarative mapping design supports bidirectional transformation;
preconditions and post-conditions govern the applicability of the patterns. In the future, they'd like to align with portions of QVT core.

Peter Friese, Jan Koehnlien, and Sven Efftinge talked about Xtext, which supports the devlopment of textual Domain Specific Languages.

I love this stuff and of course it's ironic that sucky modeling technology is exactly what you need to produce DSLs, the very thing Dave Thomas asserts to be one of the important technologies for the future of the embedded space. With an augmented EBNF grammar you can define your syntax and specify the abstract modeling onto which it maps. I think this technology will have a big impact!

I had lunch with Xavier from Soyatec and Benoit of Thales to talk about starting the SolFa project at Eclipse. Woo hoo, another cool project.

I also chatted with Steve Sfartz of Microsoft to discuss how we might start a dialog with folks working at Microsoft who clearly share common interests. He already sent me a note. Woo hoo!

My good buddy Kenn Hussey of Embarcadero presented on data models.

The data model design process covers the whole abstract range of issues from contextual, conceptual, and logical to physical, definition, and instance. He talked about Information Management Model (or something like that) to help unify things like UML, Entity Relationship Diagrams, Relational models, XML Schema, and LDAP.

After that, my other good buddy, and recent new father, Cedric Brun of Obeo, presented the EMFT Compare framework.

It's fully integration with on Eclipse's team APIs, and of course is based on comparing models structurally rather than based on comparing their serialized representations. The compare editor displays the side-by-side structural views of the model, i.e., the same as the view used in the EMF editor's outline for that model. They even have an EMF Diff model that captures the differences between the two models in the form of a serialized model. They're currently prototyping support for comparing semantic instances but displaying a graphical representation of them. It's really cool!

After that yet another good buddy---no, I wasn't on the program committee picking all my buddies---Eike Stepper presented on CDO.

He drew attention to the fact that the CDO team has committed 175 bugzillas since Ganymede as an example of how active the development is. I speculated out loud that maybe it was really buggy before; it makes you wonder how I treat people who aren't my buddies doesn't it? He showed some of the cool new things in the latest version, like structured resources organized into folders, save points to support partial rollback, passive updates to disable updates to the session based on external changes, change subscriptions for producing regular EMF notifications for changes in the remote instance, and even a query framework. He's really has been busy! He finished very quickly, but there were a heck of a lot of questions! I prompted him with a question about the fact that CDO allows objects to be garbage collected since objects do not directly contain references to one another. Eike explained that this allows CDO to scale to resources that are bigger than 4G in size, for example. That was the best question and answer session ever!

After that I talked to Hajo about writing up a project proposal for the cool stuff he demoed yesterday. Woo hoo, this is going well! On my way down to the the MTL presentation I bumped into Dave Thomas and asked him what's the difference between a model and a DSL? He said they are the same thing. Excellent, that's the right answer! He said he'll be around tomorrow, so it will be cool to see what he thinks after my talk.

The good buddies never end, because Sandro Boehm was next to present JCRM.

The goal is the foster synergy between the modeling community and the JCR community. The JCR community doesn't have good tools support and the modeling community can help produce those. The modeling community benefits by virtue of having a JCR-backed data store for EMF objects. This will help provide multi-user capabilities as well as fine-grained object-level versioning. JCR is quite a nice match for EMF's type system. EMF's reflective or dynamic delegation generator patterns allow Sandro to map all data access onto the repository and easily supports locking and versioning.

This was followed by the board meeting. Those on-site at ESE congregated in a little room.

I'd tell you all about what we talked about, but then I'd have to kill you. Or they'd kill me. You'll just have to wait for the public minutes.

Finally it was time for the reception. Lynn encouraged folks like Larry to worship her as a goddess.

Janet, Chris, and Doug enjoyed their beers, although I don't think Doug approves of idol worship.

Later I there was even a pretty young woman who couldn't keep here hands off me. Despite the smile, I felt violated. I hope her husband reads this blog.

I spent quite a bit of time chatting with Maximillian Koegel and Jonas Helming about their research work relating to change management and project management.

That was a really fun night. As is so often the case, chatting with people is more than 1/2 the fun.

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008: The Symposiums

2008-11-18T18:25:00.017-05:00

There was really good turnout for the modeling symposium.

Well over forty people attended.

Markus Voelter started the symposium with a brief outline of the agenda and a description of how the "open space" discussion would be structured in the afternoon.

Lars Schneider of Siemens presented his position paper on model quality assurance based on his research work.

He defines qualitative metrics for assessing model quality, which he terms as smells. The idea is to detect problematic patterns, i.e., bad smells, and then to use refactoring to eliminate such patterns. He described how his refactoring tool can be used to apply basic refactoring transformations and he also showed how the his graphical tool is used to design transformations.

Sandro Boehme of inovex presented a description of how EMF's EStore is used to provide support for Java soft references, a good solution for dealing with models that are too big to fit within memory.

Recall that soft references will be garbage collected when the JVM runs low on memory. By generating an EObject implementation based on the generator's reflective delegation pattern, it's possible to delegate all data access onto an InternalEObject.EStore. The store itself delegates to a map that manages the soft references under the covers. He uses this approach to implement EMFT's JCRM so it can access and traverse models larger than can fit in available memory.

Dimitrios Kolovos of York University described how GMT's Epsilon can be used to navigator heterogeneous models.

It's often the case that we need to establish links between different types of models. He described an example problem of applying probability information to an activity diagram for simulation purposes. In this scenario, it's desirable to be able to treat such information as if were just properties directly on the model. To solve this problem, the Epsilon runtime queries the available models to determine which ones know something about a specific property being associated with some type object, i.e, which ones define bridges.

Hajo Eichler of ikv++ talked about executable models.

He described some existing approaches, which as he said, are interesting, but not EMF based, and hence don't directly solve the problem. He defines operational semantics by extending Ecore and has founded it on a well-defined formalism. There is a graphical editor for specifying the dynamic behavior. He showed the debugger directly working with specified behavior. Effectively this approach allows him them very quickly specify the full semantics of a complex domain specific language.

Moritz Eysholdt of itemis described his work on meta model evolution.

He described a simple example of a document with an author-name attribute evolving to become a model with an author object to carry that name attribute. The problem is of course what happens to existing instance serialized according to the old model? If one can record the changes made to the model, that information can be used to determine how the corresponding instances need to be transformed. It's also possible to simply compare the original and final versions. In general, one needs to collect information about how the original model was changed. That information is encoded as an Epatch which groups the changes in a meaningful so that corresponding changes can be interpreted in a meaningful way against the instances.

Markus Herrmannsdoerfer described coupled evolution of meta models and models.

He gave us choice of pretty slides or a demo, so naturally the audience wanted a demo. He showed how his tool records all the changes being made to his sample model. These changes can be grouped and then annotated with instructions for how to migrate the instances. He also has refactoring transformations that can be applied and have built-in meaning in terms of migrating the corresponding instances of the model. You can learn more at his website.

Miguel Garcia presented on techniques to extend languages in the style supported by LINQ
with a focus on how to apply the same types of ideas in Java.

Annotated Ecore models can be used to specify details for how best to query instances in an SQL-like way.

Jabier Martinez of European Software Institute talked about some of the challenges faced in model drive software development, i.e., versioning and transformation, particularly those that scale to very large instances.

These are the problems they are exploring and building tools to solve.

Peter Friese and Heiko Behrens of itemis talked about Xtext, a framework for developing textual DSLs.

The idea is to support syntax that's more human readable than XML. Certainly managing and working with textual source artifacts has a long history of support. The text of course represents deep structure but all structure is implied by the text so only the source files need to be version controlled. It's difficult to work in deep meaningful ways with just source though, so an alternative is to represent the deep structure in a repository, but that implies it's necessary to resurrect the textual form when the users needs to view it, which might be lossy in terms of formatting details. A third approach is to combine these two, i.e., create an index of the deep structure from the source and maintain both.

Jos Warmer of Orinda talked about an alternative approach to large models.

Current solutions include repositories and file storage. Their solution is simply to avoid having large models. They focus on a collection of small independent DSLs along with collections of small instances. So models are composed of a number of model units and scaling happens by virtue of scaling the number of units, not growing the unit size. References across units are soft references, e.g., reference by name. Of course this implies that you'll need an index, like CrossX, to understand the soft references in order to reason about the deep structure implied by them. Effectively this is like compiling your source models into a compact representation of the deep structure.

After the presentations Markus observed that the community is maturing as evidenced by the more sophisticated topics of the interesting presentations we just saw. He then proceeded to gather topics to focus the afternoon break-out discussions.

One was focused on modeling verses programming. Kenn said "programming is modeling but modeling is not necessarily programming." The implication is that programming involves a significant focus on behavior not just structure. What is the purpose of a model generally? Typically they are defined as a target for some program to manipulate, but Kenn claims that sometimes models are just meant to communicate information. Pretty pictures, oh no!

It was asked, why don't we focus modeling more around things we've done with languages like Java, i.e., much what like Jos talked about earlier. In other words, lots of small source files and indexing them. It's key to be able to answer queries about inverse references. A focus on use cases driven by real user needs is important to achieving the same type of comfortable experience that JDT provides. Two main parts of the issue is how to compute the closure for what's to be indexed and to identify which specific things are important enough to be indexed. So we all agree we need an indexing mechanism and a query language to exploit it. Sven will propose a project that focuses on indexing.

We digresses a little at that point about the need uniquely identify every object. A URI should suffice for that. Part of the contentious issue was readable names verses arbitrary fragments that might not be human readable, e.g., a UUID. Even the issue of how the resource is serialized becomes important to understanding the issue, i.e., does the reference to some object include that full URI or is it perhaps just name based, just like a name-based Java reference. It's a bit confusing that we mix up how a resources reference each other verses how, in general, we can reference any object.

We discussed scaling via lazy loading and importantly the ability to unload things so that the heap doesn't steadily grow. It's even important to partially load objects, i.e., proxies aren't enough because sometimes specific features can be hard to compute so you'd like to defer that computation. It's important that EMF allows integration with any persistent representation
so that XML, databases, object-based stores, or repositories can be used. Often the persistent representation has an impact on what type of query mechanisms are supported.

It was also asked if scaling be transparent to the programming model or if we should expect to write our models and algorithms differently to scale better. It seems generally important to think about scalability at design time; it doesn't generally come for free. We concluded that we need good information about examples and best practices based on experience; after all, EMF's EStore API can solve many of these problems. Kenn will start a wiki about best practices.

We the crashed the e4 symposium where an excellent modeling discussion was already underway. It was interesting to hear some of the arguments against modeling because they fit in so well with my classification of all the reasons modeling is stupid.

After that we had a quick summary of the breakout sessions. It was a long and tiring symposium, but very enjoyable.

Later in the evening, the members of the Architecture Council had a nice dinner after which I decided I had enough blog fodder to choke an army, so I'd needed to get it out of my system. Tomorrow promises to be full of interesting talks followed by a great reception. Stay tuned...

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008: The Members Meeting

2008-11-18T17:13:00.014-05:00

After a good night's sleep, Monday was the start of beautiful sunny day. We did some sightseeing in town to begin the day.

In the afternoon, I attended the members meeting. There are now roughly 190 members, 22 of which are strategic members, and there are 932 committers from 75 organizations. These days we get roughly 1,000,000 package download requests per month. We are expecting about 400 ESE attendees and there are roughly 35 sponsors.

Mike talked about the initiative to create industry working groups as a way to drive the growth of the foundation and to diversify its membership. Eclipse has good infrastructure and processes, including a sound intellectual property process, to help facilitate collaboration. The working groups can leverage existing projects, feed back their requirements to those projects, and even initiate projects to address any gaps. Our first example is the Mobile Industry Working Group led by Motorola and Nokia which will focus on creating a Model Application Development Kit.

There were questions about licensing issues for these working groups, i.e, will they be stuck with EPL? Mike pointed out that 3 projects are already dual licensed, e.g., EclipseLink is also licensed under BSD so that it be consumed by GPL and be part of the JPA reference implementation. He also indicated that there are efforts underway at the board to make it possible for something like CDT's Wascana distro to be hosted at Eclipse.

Karsten Schmidt talked about the SAP Eclipse story.

SAP decided to support Java in 2000. They chose Borland's JBuilder as their IDE but they needed better access to source than was provided by JBuilder in order to build their own specific extensions, so they evaluated Eclipse and NetBeans. They also needed a model abstraction layer. By 2003 they had a version of NewWeaver based on J2EE 1.3 with Selena as their modeling layer. At that time, Borland acquired TogetherSoft and Modeling Infrastructure (MOIN) based on MOF 1.4 was started as a research project. They decided not to use EMF because they needed something that worked on the server side; how odd given that EMF has always worked there. By 2006, they became the first major vendor certified for JEE 5. By 2007 they first signed the Eclipse committer Agreement and supported a committer on WTP. They also donated their memory analyzer project to Eclipse and they now have a BPMN modeler based on MOIN.

Some challenges they faced included their conservative policies that kept them from participating; without participation they could not have real influence. Things like the EMF/MOIN split are an unfortunate consequence of that lack of direct involvement. Karsten expressed regret that they were not able to get directly involved with EMF many years ago; I was certainly very hopeful after last year's "Big Models" meeting that we'd be able to work more closely together. Unfortunately decisions made at the executive levels don't always match the wishes or expectations of those of us in the trenches. Karsten is still hopeful that perhaps it's possible to better align EMF and MOIN in the future. They also expect to fully align their current component structure onto a uniform OSGi base, and they plan to focus on the Equinox implementation for that, because the benchmarks for Equinox generally give it the lead and therefore make it the best choice. The fact that it's hosted at Eclipse makes it easier for them to participate in its evolution. It's a brave and bold new future for SAP and Eclipse.

Jeff McAffer presented an overview of the runtime project's vision of the future.

The trend these days, as Karsen just demonstrated, is that people are more and more willing to consume from open source. One problem this surfaces is how to combine those components to build solutions. Many things are possible, including the ability to install a thin Equinox WAR into which you embed your OSGi bundles. The Utopian vision is to be able to use the same component model and deploy it anywhere. We already have all major JEE vendors building on OSGi, although they don't surface that as a component model for their users. A consistent, flexible, configurable component model that allows you to integrate a diversity of components is key.

Next Jochen Krause presented on the motivation behind the e4 effort and the progress it's made.

It needs to be easier to build plugins including doing so in other languages like Javascript. Richer more flexible support for styling is an important goal, along with a service-based application model able to target the web. He wanted to reassure the community that we will remain committed to the 3.x stream for five years or more, and that we plan that 3.x plugins will continue to work in a compatibility mode in e4. We will strive to provide more uniform APIs that avoid singletons and are more finely structured as small components. Even the resource model needs to be more flexible and we need to exploit patterns like Dependency Injection. We expect that the entire workbench will be formally modeled. Overall, the goal is to create a simpler and more powerful application model. An interesting approach that has been prototyped is cross compiling SWT to Flex. He also showed Boris' sample e4 application running normally and running as a brower application; pretty impressive! Of course of invited folks to get involved!

Chris Brockman presented on some of the problems that need to be solved in the business world.

The integration of disparate sources of information across the enterprise is key issue to many. The same information can be interpreted in different ways and often separate sources of information need to be related as if they originated from a uniform semantic source. The SMILA approach is focused on this. The idea is to create a shared architecture standard. Just a single company like Volkswagen might have 500 applications running just in Germany, so even just maintaining connectors for these applications is a significant cost. It's easier for application based on Eclipse because providers can be more easily encouraged to provide integration directly. Important players like SAP have gotten involved. He also drew attention to Eclipse's IP process, which, although can seem onerous, is something that's key to using open source in a way that's enterprise friendly. Ultimately it has extreme value for corporate consumers.

To help bring in the schedule, Ian Skerret gave a very rapid overview of the Mobile Working Group Mike talked about earlier.

It's a great example of the foundation's successful new approach for attracting new types of members.

Martin Oberhuber presented an overview of the Architecture Council, what it is, and what it's doing.

There is a representative for each PMC, a representative for each strategic member, as well as members appointed based on merit. The AC council facilitates mentorship and all new projects must have at least two mentors from the AC. It fields community requests via bugzilla; did you know you could do that? It interacts directly with the EMO. And it acts as a channel for raising high level issues to the board. An example of how an issue was addressed was the change to make the committers mailing list be moderated so it can remain open without becoming a frustrating source of SPAM. The AC can help offload work for the foundation staff by fielding questions directly; we have a lot of experience to share. In general, its overview of the community helps it act as a filter when it comes to issues reaching the EMO and the board. Martin has done an outstanding job making the AC active and effective.

Our beloved Bjorn, acting as Rich, talked very briefly about the activities of the Planning Council,
which has recently set itself up as the body to drive the release train for the Galileo release.

He talked about the impact of the tragedy of the commons, i.e., how everyone might want something but no one is wiling to help make it come about, with the hope others will do it for them. See how he's going to crush those who don't pony up? They don't call him knuckles for nothing. We fully expect that Galileo will release on time and on schedule just as every previous release.

Maxim Groouchevoi introduced instinctools, a new Eclipse member based in Belarus.

He talked about the DITA technology developed by his company. The idea is to provide single-source support for the documentation process and to support the full documentation life cycle.

Finally Ralph talked about the growth of Eclipse in Europe. There he is explaining how he's carving up the European pie.

All this talking and listening is hungry work so a group of us stormed a local restaurant in search of a cozy table for 22.

It was a long hard day, but even the walk back was pretty.

I was looking forward to the symposiums!