Things are Heating Up

It seems I've been waiting so long for spring to heat up, and now, all of a sudden, in typical Ontario style, we've suddenly leaped right into summer. It's 24 degrees Celsius today!


For you Americans using that antiquated old measurement system that the rest of the world tossed aside years ago, that means its nice and warm, not below freezing. Other hot news for the day is the fact that Marcelo is having a baby. Well, obviously not Marcelo himself, but rather his wife. I expect to hear word about little Alyssa very soon, hopefully a blog with pictures!


Things have also been heating up on 205205 though, not in such a good way. I'm impressed by Carolyn's valorous effort to make concrete suggestions for improvements. I confess that, like Steve, I'm a bit frustrated by the discussion. Well, maybe not quite like Steve; he has a way with words that I can't hope to match! I would like to see us prominently feature the Ganymede Packages on our main community download page so that our users can more easily get an early start on testing them. (Note the new modeling package with its stunningly beautiful logo!) But I'm not a web designer nor a marketing expert, so I have to respect expert opinions. The discussion seems to be improving again. I wonder what others think?


Oh well, at least it's Friday and it's a particularly lovely day for a rum swizzler out on a lawn chair. Look at this little guy I found packed away in his little hidey hole, waiting for an evening of courtship and hopefully an illicit rendezvous at the pond.


Speaking of hidey holes, Dave got to crawl out of his little book writing hidey hole and be a developer for the last two weeks. He helped finish off our generated support for content types. He also helped with the support for packing enumeration values into bit flags. Java might not support packed fields like C, but EMF certainly does. No wonder it's the most popular project on the download page, although the April 1st update on the data is a little suspicious:


If you have a model with enumeration or boolean features, you should consider taking advantage of this. After all a boolean variable uses 4 bytes but stores only 1 bit of data, wasting the other 31 bits. Not only that, but EObjectImpl has an eFlags field with lots of bits left unused. We suggest using "eFlags" as the field, and reserving 8 bits for future EMF to use, as we've done here for XSD:


Reduced storage for your models is now just a code generation option away and has been brought to you by the friendly, helpful, and hard working EMF team.