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[Acceleo] Tool chain [message #793212]

Tue, 07 February 2012 22:14

Mickaël Vera

Messages: 8
Registered: February 2012

Junior Member

Hi,

I'm new to acceleo M2T and I'm looking for the best tool chain for my project. My objective is to generate a persistent java model with specific properties from a model. My model classes are "customer", "teams", "projects" ... It may contain hundred of classes in the future.

I managed to generate a few java beans from an ecore model. I built this model with the minimalist editor provided by eclipse.

But is ecore and its tools a good solution for my needs ? I'm afraid I will face limitations with ecore that I found poor compared to UML. Is ecore adapted to such domains models or is it only designed to meta modelisation ?

Another solution is UML. But I can't buy a commercial product. And I haven't been excited by any free UML tool integrated in eclipse.

What would you recommend me ? Continue with ecore or give a try to Papyus, Topcased or another tool ?

Thanks,
Mickaël

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Re: [Acceleo] Tool chain [message #793567 is a reply to message #793212]

Wed, 08 February 2012 09:46

Laurent Goubet

Messages: 1902
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Hi Mickaël,

We use ecore to create all of our metamodels, and it is more than sufficient to meet all of our needs. It lacks the complexity of UML, yet provides just the necessary concepts for most domain specific model. UML indeed features much more different constructs, but you need to determine whether these are necessary for your needs, or on the contrary whether the features provided by ecore are enough. Without more information on what you want/need to modelize, this is the most I can tell Smile

.

The minimalist editor provided by Eclipse is only an example of what a tool could do to edit ecore models. You can give a try to Obeo Designer (available for download on the Eclipse marketplace. To date, the screenshots displayed on the french EMF wikipedia page display samples of Obeo Designer, for example this one). Another option would be to give a try to Ecore Tools. Though it is somewhat aging, it can be downloaded from the release train update site (already registered in your eclipse instance, go to Help > Install new software... and select the update site "Indigo", "Helios", "Galileo", or "Ganymede", according to the version of Eclipse you installed, then search for EcoreTools).

If you truly believe that ecore is not sufficient or otherwise have a requirement to use UML, there are some well working open-source modelers available for downloads through the marketplace, searching for "uml". Papyrus is not available from the marketplace, and the download metrics for Topcased does not seem to be available, but I know that UML designer gets roughly 700 downloads/month.

Laurent Goubet
Obeo

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