In my last post I informally introduced the notion of metamodel and mentioned that one of the tools that is used around them is Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF). In this post, I am presenting EMF because it is at the heart of a lot of other MDE technologies. What Is EMF?
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This is an informal introduction to metamodeling. The target audience for this post are developers that find themselves working with metamodeling tools but have never been introduced to them and need a basic understanding to finish the task at hand. What Is a Metamodel? Let us start with a simple example, your software needs to represent arithmetic expression additions.
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While doing some research on web-based tool, I recently found this excellent article by the team at EclipseSource. I like the way they present the differences between web and desktop-based tools focusing on the following axes: Installability Portability Performance and responsiveness Usability Cost I recently started studying these web-based tools to implement some personal projects and I found that there is another dimension worth mentioning: interoperability.
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Agile methodologies are pervasive in today’s development culture. The ideas are used not only in software development but in other domains as far from software as sales. However, when we develop model-based tools, we are usually faced with the challenge to develop a DSL, or several in small iterations. This creates several challenges, but today I am going to be focusing on the specification of the requirements.
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I have been developing using the Eclipse IDE basically since college. In those days, being able to use a complex IDE was seen as the mark of the professional developer. Freshmen coded using a simple editor and the compiler directly from the console, geeks used an editor like Vim and some build tool to automate the build process, but to code “like a professional”, you used the mighty IDE.
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