Wed 23 Apr 2008
I’ve got a letter from my university stating the title of my diploma theses “Entwicklung eines graphischen Editors zur Unterstützung eines modellgetriebenen Entwicklungsprozesses” (Development of a graphical editor to support a model driven software development process) and that I should finish my work before the 28th July (which is 127 days ahead).
Mon 21 Apr 2008
Tue 15 Apr 2008
There will will be two talks about MDSD at the TFH Berlin on the 18th April. Both talks - one about using MDSD as productivity gain with the dynamic framework Grails and the other about a Lego Mindstorms NXT (which I have already seen during the Eclipse DemoCamp in Hamburg) - are very interesting.
See you there!
Mon 18 Feb 2008
I have just seen, that by now xText supports external references out of the box. This is a long awaited and really useful feature. Thanks a lot.
Mon 18 Feb 2008
Step 1 (real live): You have the wish to get a cup of tea of “Pai Mu Tan”.
Step 2 (model): You are creating a wish-model containing an element of type “Cup” which has an attribute named “content” of type string and the value “Pai Mu Tan”. The model is the digital representation of a real-life-wish.
Step 3 (metamodel): You want to create other wishes too and you are designing a metamodel. The wish-metamodel contains a the root element “Wishes” containing a many-containment reference “wishes” to the type “Wish”. The abstract type “Wish” is derived by the types “Cup”, “Book”, “FreshAir” and “OtherWish”. “Cup” has an attribute “content” while “Book” has an attribute “title” of type String. “FreshAir” does not need an attribute and “OtherWish” has no meaningful attributes. Using the wish-metamodel you could express a lot of wishes.
Step 4 (editor): You want others to express their wishes. Let’s create an editor, they could use to do that. Using Eclipse and your metamodel it is really simple to create an EMF based tree editor. You are happy.
Step 5 (great models): Your models grow (you have extended your metamodel with other wish-types) and you want to group your wishes by occasion (Birthday, Christmas, other) if they are of long-term, short-term or just-now. You are doing that by extending the metamodel with other types (AbstractOccasion, Birthday, Christmas, AbstractWhen, LongTerm, ShortTerm, JustNow) and some connection types connecting your wish with when they should be active. it is hard to keep the overview about all your wishes - you want a better editor (which is a wish-type of it’s own).
Step 6 (graphical editor): You have chosen GMF as your editor framework. It is great - you could express all you want - your wishes, the occasions and whether your wishes are more short- or long-term in a model driven way and without writing one single line of java-code. Now you have the overview about all the wishes.
Step 7 (more wish-types): Every time you create a new wish-type in your metamodel you have to copy-and-paste-and-change some parts of the GMF-models to express the editor object for your new type. You want more abstraction like a templating engine for GMF-models.
I am currently developing such a model-templating engine called GenGMF. You could create a template-tree for the GMF-Graph and for the GMF-Map models having place-holders for the type-names you want to instantiate (e.g. “__TYPENAME__NodeFigure”) and some modelled instructions how to instantiate the tree in the GMF-models. It is even possible to change the instantiated trees on-the-fly. For example - I reengineered the sample editor from one of my last posts. The rectangle and the elliptic nodes are instantiated from the same template (which only knows rectangles). A XTend-based creation Filter changes the Rectangle to Ellipse - the rest of the tree is the same. Post processing (also via XTend) is also available to insert more stuff into the generated models.
Thu 7 Feb 2008
10% done.
20% done.
30% done.
40% done.
50% done.
60% done.
70% done.
80% done.
90% done.
100% done.
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120% done.
130% done.
Fri 18 Jan 2008
I don’t have a working telephone since last Sunday.
I’ve called my telephone provider to make it work on Tuesday. They answered that they created a service ticket and will call me back later.
Nothing happened.
I’ve called again on Wednesday. They wanted to call me at least the next day.
Nothing happened.
I’ve called again on Friday morning. They wanted to call me back.
Nothing happened.
I’ve called again on Friday evening. (As a remember - I am waiting since Tuesday for a call). They wanted to call me back. While answering I may have spoken a bit to tartly, but…
I’ve got a call within two minutes.
In this call I’ve heard, that there is no ticket, so they made one (guaranteed). It is unlikely that I will be called back before the weekend, but…
About one week later I’ve got a call on my mobile phone. Everything did worked except that the calls didn’t come through. There was a bug in a dumb telephony socket (not really - but it just did not work)…
Fri 11 Jan 2008
I have seen - there are a lot of interesting talks in the newthinking store in Berlin Mitte
and in the Kalkscheune
See you there.
Thu 20 Dec 2007
I have got the time to set up the entry site for my currently most active project MetamodelDoc. It is an Eclipse Plug-In for generating a documentation of a metamodel. At present this has to be an Ecore metamodel. As a sample I’ve generated a documentation of the Ecore metamodel (which is expressed in it self). If you want to give it a try just install the plugins via the Update Site. The generation is triggered from the context menu of an .ecore-file.
