Michael,
Comments below.
Wenz, Michael wrote:
Hi,
I just noticed that my first reply does not appear in the
modeling-pmc archives. I’m not sure I it reached anybody, so I just
mail my
answer again.
Regards,
Michael
Hi all,
sorry for the late reply,
but we first
needed to have some team-internal discussions on this which could only
be done
now as all team members are back from their holidays now - and German
Christmas
and New Years holidays are traditionally long... ;-)
We placed our proposal
intentionally
directly under the EMP umbrella and not under GMF, because we didn't
want to
create the impression that switching a tool that was generated using
GMF (and
its standard runtime) to Graphiti would be very simple. Having an
alternative
runtime sounds - at least to us - like it is simply done by setting
another
flag somewhere and maybe trigger a re-generation and that's it. But
that's
simply not the case.
It would be nice if that worked, but I can imagine it's not that simple.
In fact, Graphiti has a
completely
different approach than the GMF runtime (keyword here is features,
which is the
concept to describe a certain behavior in Graphiti). In general the
needed
runtime artifacts differ quite a lot from what is needed for GMF.
Actually, I'm
not really sure if the information collected inside the GMF metamodels
is
sufficient to generate a tool upon the Graphiti framework; additional
information might be necessary whereas existing information in the GMF
metamodels might not be useful at all for Graphiti generation.
An additional argument for
not being
placed under the GMF project is the fact that GMF is very much based
upon the
generation of tools, whereas Graphiti is intended to be a runtime API
the user
codes against. We have had our own internal approaches with generated
tools
inside SAP and always ended at a point where the generation approach
came to an
end and hand-crafting was necessary again. And manually adapting
generated
coding can be very awkward. In our opinion, the generation of tools is
great
for easy tools or for showcases and demos, but real tools offering
increased
value and high usability to end-users will, in our view, need manual
coding.
Yes, optimal rarely lies at the extremes.
Because of that, the
generation of tools
is not in the focus of the Graphiti project at all. Of course it would
be
possible to add it on top but that is not our short- or mid-term
intention. But
being an additional runtime for GMF would require just this very soon.
On the other hand we can
also understand
the argument of polluting the Modeling Project with yet another
graphical
framework. From that aspect we would vote for a kind of umbrella
project as Ed
has suggested. Nevertheless, we cannot judge what that would mean from
the
administrative point of view...
To my thinking it's just more of an organizational thing to create an
organized tree structure with high level categories under which to fit
the very large and growing numbers of projects.
Any comments or
suggestions welcome.
Two question in the end:
1) What would it mean for
us as a
project if we become a sub-subproject underneath such an umbrella
project (or
the GMF project) instead of being a subproject underneath EMP?
It has effectively almost no impact, e.g., what's the impact on JET,
Acceleo and Xpand that they are under an umbrella project? It helps, at
least to my mind, that they're grouped meaningfully. One small impact
is that the leads of the top level projects are on the PMC, but often
the leads don't attend as in today and anyone is more than welcome to
attend PMC calls if they're interested or would like their voice to be
heard.
2) Should this discussion
be continued
here or shouldn't it be shifted to the Modeling Forum?
I doubt many folks outside of the PMC would have much opinion on this.
Kind regards,
Michael
Michael Wenz
Senior
Developer
TD Core
JS&I DPI (AG)
SAP AG
Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16
69190 Walldorf, Germany
T +49 6227 7-61613
F +49 6227 78-27044
E michael.wenz@xxxxxxx
www.sap.com
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