CfP: Workshop on Methodical Development of Modeling Tools

How time flies... only recently I posted about a workshop (held at EDOC 2013), and today I can announce the 2014 version, held at EDOC 2014. It's the

2nd International 
Workshop on Methodical Development of Modeling Tools (ModTools14)
on the 17th IEEE International Enterprise Computing Conference EDOC 2014

This year, EDOC takes place in Ulm, Germany. You will find the call for paper and other information at the workshop's hompage: http://www.wi-inf.uni-duisburg-essen.de/ModTools14. Submission deadline is April 1st 2014 (really, no kidding).

Update (10/4/2014): Submission Deadline extended: 2014-04-28 (final extension by the main conference)

Although I'm not working at the university anymore, I still think that a workshop like this is quite important because it tries to bridge the gap between pure scientific research and real world requirements. If you look at scientific conferences, many researchers present tools in order to evaulate there approach. From my own experience I know that often you will find dragons when you try to actually implement these tools. These dragons, once disturbed, may even threaten the whole theoretically nice approach. The workshop tries to give the brave knights---and since you are reading an Eclipse related blog, that's probably you!---fighting these dragons a place to exchange thoughts, methods, and ideas. And, last but not least, it gives you an opportunity to publish about that kind of work (the workshop proceedings are published together with the conference proceedings at IEEE).

Retrospect: DemoCamp in Berlin

Yesterday I attended the Eclipse DemoCamp in Berlin. It took place at Fraunhofer Fokus, and (as the last democamps) it was organized by Tom Ritter (thank you, Tom!). This time, there were ten (10!) presentations, seems as if we should organize a DemoDay next time. The camp started with a nice welcome talk by Ralph Müller, encouraging the audience to become Eclipse members (I will talk with my employer about that, promised ;-) ) and visit Eclipse Summit Europe (I won't miss it). Kristian Duske (committer on the GEF3D project) presented a "GEF3D Based Editor for the GMF Mapping Model", which was the subject of his diploma thesis. His editor enables the creation and editing of the GMF mapping model using simple drag-and-drop mouse operations. In contrast to the tree-based GMF editors, all involved models are visualized in a graphical manner, and since all models are visualized in a single 3D scene, inter-model-connections are visible, too. I really like the idea and his presentation, but since I was his tutor, I'm not really an impartial observer ;-)

Fig 1: Kristian's 3D GMF Mapping Editor

Martin Esser then demonstrated a small editor he has created with GMF (unfortunately without Kristian's 3D editor ;-) ) for variability models (aka feature diagrams). The challenge is to implement these arcs connecting edges of optional or alternative features. I usually draw these diagrams using OmniGraffle, and although there is a stencil for these diagrams available, it is painful to adjust these arcs -- a GMF based editor would be a great help. Maybe Kang et al designed these diagrams in order to test the abilities of programmers of graphical editors... (BTW, I just stumbled over this Eclipse project proposal, they want to provide a graphical editor as well) It seems as if there is an Xtext presentation at every democamp ;-), and of course there was a talk about it in Berlin, too. Peter Friese gave a short overview of this really nice tool for creating editors (and more) for textual DSLs. I have attend a couple of Xtext presentations (e.g. at ESE 2008 and 2009), and although all these presentations used different slides and were presented by different persons, the slides are always magnificent (with great photos and nicely illustrated). Maybe they have an Xtext based tool for generating these slides... hmm... Ralph Müller mentioned something about Ytext in his keynote, maybe this is a new tool for generating presentations? After a short break (with Eclipse sponsored sandwiches and soft drinks ;-)), Marcus Engelhardt demonstrated a tool called Metrino for measuring models. Metrics can be defined using OCL for UML or Ecore based DSLs, and the tool creates nice reports and radar charts. IMHO model metrics are an important tool for modelers, and I always have the plan to create tool with GEF3D in order to display the metrics on top of the diagrams (using the city metaphor) as illustrated in Figure 2... Marcus, if you'd like to combine that with Metrino, I would be happy to assist you!

Fig. 2: Visualization of metrics with GEF3D

Joachim Hänsel and Jaroslav Svacina introduced their tool EvoTest for creating tests automatically with evolutionary techniques. I know that tests are very important, but (shame on me) I'm neither an expert for testing nor for evolutionary techniques. However, their tool looks very interesting, and I was impressed by the ability of that tool to generate white box tests considering path coverage. Next, Martin Köster talked (slides are available here) about how he created an Eclipse based IDE for the Clojure language, a Lisp (that language driving you crazy with brakets) dialect for the JVM. It was very interesting to learn how he used the DLTK in combination with his own ANTLR parser. There seem to be a lot of issues addressed by Xtext and DLTK. I wonder if it would make sense to integrate these two tools. Stephan Herrmann then presented a new episode of the famous Object Teams series. After a short "previously on OT" flash back (summarizing OT as a great tool for reusing existing components in a flexible (via AOP techniques) yet controlled (via modules and a role-team-concept) manner), the story continued with a special and important problem: persistence. He explained how it is possible to use OT in combination with O/R-mappers -- with minimal effort by using OT techniques. Actually, this topic was subject of a diploma thesis (in german language) by Olaf Otto. OT is a proposed Eclipse project, and I hope it will become a real Eclipse project, soon. Igor Novakovic demonstrated a powerful tool called SMILA. It is an Eclipse project for setting up tool chains for querying, processing and extracting data. In his demo, he showed how to combine some cool Fraunhofer tools for image recognition with a search engine (Lucene) (probably other tools were involved as well). The nice thing about SMILA is that in the end all these tools are combined in a way that some data can be queried in a very simple manner (e.g. HTML formular). In the demo, some chemical structures could be searched in a collection of research papers. Simply querying the text content wouldn't be that thrilling, but in that case, a tool analyzed the figures in the papers and presented the molecules using Jmol. Some years ago I integrated a search engine (Verity Information Server) with a CMS based on StoryServer, and a tool like SMILA would have been a great help (I assume that with SMILA I would have spent days instead of months to accomplish that task...). Finally, Enrico Schnepel presented a small framework called emf.observables for simplifying EMF databinding. His cool (Prezi based) slides are available, too. Actually it is a small yet helpful tool, generating some plugins next to your EMF model implementation with some wrapper classes hiding the complexity of EMFObservables/IObservable. It was a really interesting and inspiring evening: A big thank you to all the presenters. See you all again at the next Berlin Eclipse DemoCamp (or Day ;-)).

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008, Retrospect

This was my first Eclipse event so I was very excited. Unfortunately, my proposal about GEF3D was rejected. But anyway, it was a lot of fun! Here are some thoughts about some talks. Quentin Glineur (Obeo) talked about model-to-model transformations with ATL and QVT. Quentin listed several use cases for m2m-transformations: validation, refactoring, reexpression and consistency checking. He is currently implementing an engine for Declarative QVT based on the ATL virtual machine. Later I had a long discussion with him about model transformations. I'm really exited about his QVT implementation, which will be available at Eclipse.org. Jan Köhnlein, Peter Friese, and Sven Efftige (itemis) presented xText. Since I'm fighting (but don't get me wrong: xText is a super cool tool) with xText for a couple of weeks to get my own transformation language working, I was happy to hear thet the upcoming version of xText will solve a lot of problems, such as easier implementation of expressions or mixing of languages and grammars (I could use that for including OCL). I had lunch with Sven and it seems as if every little problem (or bug) will be solved in the next version of xText, it's a pitty that I have to finish my project before it will be released (feature freeze will be in March 2009, it will be part of Galileo). Since I have heard so much about Jazz I was especially interested in the talk by André Weinand (IBM). For me Jazz looks pretty much like a tool set for Scrum, but this could be a misinterpretation by a Scrum master (like the guy with the hammer for whom anything looks like a nail). I'm still a little bit confused whether Jazz is freely available or not. But it looks definitely impressing and I'd like to work with it. For example, it introduces certain "isolation levels", for example a (personal) repository workspace. That is each developer has his own individual repository for backup and so on, and there will be a separated project repository. Thinking about that I'm wondering how I will work with my code when it has been moved to the Eclipse repository... A while ago I posted a master thesis proposal about visualizing model differences using EMF Compare and GEF3D. Unfortunately, no student has shown interest in this thing. Nevertheless it was very interesting listening to Cédric Brun (Obeo) about EMF Compare. While seeing his slides I was thinking about new cool visualizations, for example an Apple Time Machine like view of different model versions in a repository. One of the highlights was Ed Merks' talk about "The Unbearable Stupidity of Modeling". While I agree with most of his statements, for example the exaggerated use of the prefix "meta", I noticed (again) this little difference between the american and european conception of "model" and related terms such as "abstraction". I have to work out that thing in my thesis ;-). Maybe it's because the great book on model theory by Herber Stachowiak was never translated into English... For people using the word "meta" too much, and thus maybe suffer under some kind of modeling fever (my adviser once diagnosed me with "Modellithis"), I can recommend the very funny article "UML Fever" by Alex E. Bell, or (in severe cases) you may consider joining the Meta-Modellers Anonymous. Or simply read Ed's blog regularly. Scott Lewis and Marcelo Mayworm's talk about ECF (the Eclipse Communication Framework) was quite nice, they showed a small video about two pair programmers editing a single piece of source code using ECF. It's very similar to my beloved editor SubEthaEdit. I'm wondering whether it would be possible to integrate ECD ad GEF3D somehow? David Sciamma (Anyware Technologies) presented the new and upcoming features of the Ecore tools, that is the Ecore diagram editor. Version 0.9 will be part of Galileo. Kristian Duske is currently working on a 3D port of these tools, so it would be nice to keep contact with the 2D developers. To be honest I didn't knew David is also developing these Ecore tools, I "only" knew him as the author of the TopCased UML editor. So it would be the second work of David which will be ported to 3D, since his TopCased UML editor is the one I'm using in all my transformation chain examples (thinking about that I'm reminded to update my 3D version to the latest TopCased UML 2 version, I hope that will be as quickly done as the previous version, that is within two days ;-) ). Having all that trouble with licenses and third party libraries in the context of the review of LWJGL and JOGL (and even my initial GEF3D contribution), I was very curious aboutJanet Campbell's talk about "IP for Eclipse Committers". IP is short for "intellectual property" and this talk was especially about the "due diligence". That is (for people not that familiar with the Eclipse Process) there are a bunch of rules to be followed before code can be committed to Eclipse (i.e. some Eclipse CVS or SVN). IMHO this is an outstanding quality of Eclipse to be very concerned about these issues, even if I have a lot of trouble because of that (LWJGL was not approved, and JOGL is only to be approved because SGI has changed its free license agreements two months ago). So, a big thank you to all that people doing these legal reviews and stuff! It was a really great experience to meet all that people I knew only from their email addresses, and especially people I was mailing with so much for the last couple of weeks because of GEF3D: Chris Aniszczyk, Ed Merks and Anne Jacko. It's a really great community, and I'm happy to be a part of it :-)