Thursday, June 25, 2009
 

Eclipse, Galileo and oAW

Yesterday was the big day: Eclipse 3.5 Galileo was just released.

I thought I'd use this occasion to give you an update about oAW in this context.

The Galileo release contains what has been known as oAW 5. Over the last year, oAW has been broken down into its constituent components, and the components have been contributed to Eclipse. oAW 5 can thus be considered a distribution, or packaging, of these components.

However, currently there's no real oAW 5 release, specifically the openArchitectureWare.org website does not yet reflect the newest release.

If you want to get the new code, you should simply download the available distributions. You can get the Everything-in-Modeling distribution from here the Eclipse download page or you can get the oAW distribution from itemis' oAW site.

So what's new in the current release?

First of all, Xtext has been completely rewritten, as part of the TMF project. This is why we now call it TMF Xtext. The new version is much more scalable, supports cross-language references well, supports (single) language inheritance and is generally much more flexible. Go to the official TMF Xtext project page to find (the really nice!) documentation and access to newsgroups and mailing lists.

oAW 5 also contains - as you would expect - Xpand, Xtend and Check. These are all wrapped under the M2T Xpand project. Compared to 4.3.1, no major changes have been made; a couple of bugs were fixed and a number of minor adaptations have been made to work better as an Eclipse citizen. There's also a wiki page as well as newsgroups and mailing lists.

Finally, the release also contains the tried and trusted workflow engine. It is now its own EMFT project, with the goal of encouraging other transformation tool developers to write a workflow component to integrate with workflows. Imaging you could simply use an ATL transformation or MOFScript generator as part of your workflow...!?

So you might wonder: what has happened to openArchitectureWare as a whole, now that all its "real stuff" has become Eclipse projects and the downloads are available as part of distros? There is now an oAW Working Group. It has its own mailing list and website, and this is the place where we want to gather oAW users, discuss the tool and coordinate further development in the context of the Eclipse development process. The openArchitectureWare.org website will be adapted soon to act as a redirect to the working group page.

Thanks to all the oAW comitters, specifically the itemis guys in Kiel, for doing a great job with the new release, specifically with TMF Xtext. I am not completely happy with all the decisions they've made, but it is an important and very good step forward!
 
Comments:
You might want to get it from here:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/epp/downloads/release/galileo/R/eclipse-modeling-galileo-incubation-macosx-cocoa.tar.gz

If you use a Mac, now windoze :-)
 
An interview with Jan Köhnlein, member of the Xtext development team can be found here. In the interview, Jan gives a brief outlook on future developments for Xtext. Definitely worth a read!
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

back to voelter.de

ABOUT ME
This is Markus Voelter's Blog. It is not intended as a replacement for my regular web site, but rather as a companion that contains ideas, thoughts and loose ends.

ARCHIVES
December 2005 / January 2006 / February 2006 / March 2006 / April 2006 / May 2006 / June 2006 / July 2006 / August 2006 / September 2006 / October 2006 / November 2006 / December 2006 / February 2007 / March 2007 / April 2007 / May 2007 / June 2007 / July 2007 / September 2007 / October 2007 / November 2007 / December 2007 / January 2008 / February 2008 / March 2008 / April 2008 / May 2008 / June 2008 / July 2008 / August 2008 / September 2008 / October 2008 / November 2008 / December 2008 / January 2009 / February 2009 / March 2009 / April 2009 / May 2009 / June 2009 / July 2009 / August 2009 / September 2009 / October 2009 / November 2009 / December 2009 / January 2010 / February 2010 / April 2010 / May 2010 / June 2010 / July 2010 / August 2010 / September 2010 / October 2010 / November 2010 / December 2010 / January 2011 / March 2011 / April 2011 / May 2011 / June 2011 / July 2011 / October 2011 / November 2011 / December 2011 / January 2012 / February 2012 / October 2012 / January 2013 /

FEED
You can get an atom feed for this blog.