Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Advanced GMF

Having collected about two years of experience with Eclipse's Graphical Modeling Framework, I am now trying to summarize what could be improved or added to the framework. These are my favorites
  1. Support for a singleton editing domain (keep all semantic and diagram resources in the same resource set)
  2. Support for non-canonical diagrams (multiple diagrams for the same semantic model)
  3. Enable the OpenDiagramEditPolicy (linked diagrams)
Most of these issues can be implemented without touching GMF runtime code, i.e. by means of aspectual template changes and extensions. But as these are really fundamental and reoccurring topics, I'd rather see them as base functionality inside the original framework. Maybe I can push the GMF project in that direction?

1 comment:

Matthias Köster said...

Hi Jan,

First: Best wishes for your birthday! Great to see you blog about your work, it's really great to read about your progress and looks as if you really have a lot of interesting stuff to do at your new employer.
Second: Sad that GMF still lacks these features! I'm mentoring a diploma thesis which uses GMF to specify a diagram interchange for AUTOSAR models and since the AUTOSAR metamodel is quite complex (the model was heavily inspired by UML, but uses quite different names and is even more complex than UML;-), we also had to tweak the generated code. But currently that's the only "project" in which I#m working with eclipse. But I#m eagerly awaiting TMF, perhaps we can use it to generate our EJBs...

Best Regards,
Matthias