An ad hoc record of Christian W. Damus's professional and personal activity.
This past winter I was stuck in the basement for close to three months while a kitchen and bath renovation on the main floor took over not only those spaces but also my office. These conditions prompted an idea — and a journey — that sucked me in deeper than I had ever intended, but which in the end gave me a stunning kitchen feature for the ages.
As not all models that EMF Compare operates on will be described in terms of a façade, it is equally to be expected that some models will only partially comprise domain-specific content that can be described by a façade. So, models will often present a mix of content in various languages, some of which have façades and some which don't: imagine a UML design model that mixes "pure UML" content that…
Yes, it has been a while since I last blogged, and that was before a long run of work on the Papyrus-RT project which just this month reached the all-important 1.0 release . Now I have changed tack slightly, still working on Eclipse open-source projects, but with a focus on the EMF Compare . At least, for now. I am diving head-first into this project with some prototyping/experimentation in the…
The Mars release of the Eclipse Papyrus project is upon us. In this release, I went pretty deep on new features in the diagrams, a part of the GMF technology stack with which I have historically been least familiar. Modeling Assistants The first major feature in this release was the introduction of Modeling Assistants to Papyrus UML diagrams. The underpinnings of this functionality have been in…
Last week I presented an "Introduction to OCL" lunch-and-learn talk to a private client. We had some technical troubles with the remote screen-sharing system, so the live demo portion of the presentation didn't exactly turn out as we had hoped. Consequently, to finish the job and to ensure that my work of preparing demo materials wouldn't go to waste, I decided to record screencasts instead and…
This week's M3 milestone of the Mars release of the Eclipse Papyrus project adds new capabilities for profile applications in your UML models. Now, profile applications, and the extensions of your model elements by the stereotypes that they define, can be stored separately from the packages in your models to which they are applied. The brief (seven-minute) video above demonstrates the most…
Update 2: 25 April 2014 This story has a happy ending. In less than a week, my very helpful contact at PRESTO resolved all of my problems: all of the cost of the six cards that I didn't need has been refunded I have returned those cards to PRESTO (at no expense to me) my original card is now in good working order again. The balance is positive: the analysis determined that there was an extra $80…
The M6 milestone of the Luna release of Eclipse Papyrus introduces some rationalization in the dialogs presented by the Properties view for creation and editing of related model elements. Previously, these dialogs were not "transactional": every discrete edit action in a dialog was applied immediately to the model. Read beyond the break to see how this has changed.
The M6 milestone of the Luna release of Eclipse Papyrus will provide some improvements in the handling of read-only model resources in the diagram editor, the Properties view, and the Model Explorer. There are two main themes in the enhancement of read-only resources: * better protection against unwanted/inappropriate changes to read-only resources * treating all dependencies of the model open in…
The previous article in this series, like so many before it, was all about features for end-users working collaboratively on models in Papyrus with CDO. Today, we turn our attention to the administrative user, that individual who is reponsible for providing the resources that everybody else needs to do their work. Today's M3 milestone of the Luna release of CDO and Papyrus adds several new…
Last time, we looked at searching for stuff in your Papyrus model repositories. What is better than searching for models and documents? Linking to them so that you don't have to search again. The Kepler release of Papyrus has a facility for creating hyperlinks from shapes in diagrams to arbitrary documents in the local filesystem or anywhere on the Internet that is addressable by a URL. This is…
The first new feature of CDO model repository integration in the Luna release of Papyrus has landed: model search. As usual, I have recorded a short video demonstrating this new feature. In the Kepler release, Papyrus added text-based and OCL-based searching of models in the Papyrus Search tab of the Eclipse Search dialog. Naturally, this only covered searching models in the workspace. Now, with…
There has been some interesting discussion on the cross-project issues mailing list at Eclipse in the last few days, about the Eclipse download packages. There are numerous questions, concerns, assumptions, and opinions about the number, size, utility, and public perception of these packages. Even I have some.
One of the most important things we can do with our models is to validate them, testing them against general-purpose and domain-specific well-formedness rules. Last week, we saw how to reuse packages from models stored in a repository in the Papyrus Kepler release. This week, we take a look at validating models. After all, you wouldn't want to share and re-use packages that aren't up to muster,…
Last week's instalment of the CDO integration tech preview series for the Kepler release explored model validation in repository models. This week, we take a look at customizing the Properties View. Papyrus offers end users a powerful model-driven solution for customization of the Properties View. This enables a convenient UI for editing model elements tailored to what's important in a specific…
In last week's instalment of the Papyrus Model Repository tech preview series, I showed how to create new models in a CDO repository. This week we look at reusing model content by importing packages and applying profiles from models stored in a repository. The latest development on the cdo_kepler branch in Papyrus SVN refactors the "Import Package From Workspace" and "Apply Profile(s)" dialogs to…
Last week, I introduced the in-progress integration of CDO model repositories into Papyrus for the Kepler release. The starting point was migration of existing models from the Eclipse workspace into a repository. But, what if you don't have models, yet? Do you have to create them in the workspace first, then suck them into a repository? Not any more! The latest development on the cdo_kepler branch…
The M5 milestone of the Kepler release brought support for UML models in CDO repositories to Eclipse. I wrote then that this provides a foundation for collaborative model editing in Papyrus using CDO. Well, that work has progressed far enough that I can offer a preview of Papyrus on CDO in action. Here is a short video introducing, in less than 15 minutes, an early stage of CDO integration in the…
The Eclipse CDO and UML2 projects have both published their M5 milestones on the road to the Kepler release. In this milestone, UML models can now be shared in CDO repositories! A lot of fixes and enhancements have gone into this milestone of both the CDO and UML2 projects to make UML models fully functional in CDO repositories. In several ways, some small and some big, UML is a peculiar EMF…
After a few years away, I am (finally) re-connecting with a community that I had been following still but not really participating in. As of today, I am once again an Eclipse committer. I have been honoured with election to the EMF CDO (Connected Data Objects) project committer team and Eclipse Foundation's provisioning of my account is complete. Thanks to Eike and the whole team for inviting me…