I'm taking the opportunity of a long airport connection to
capture (while it's fresh) and report to you what happened
during this week of conference. There was 619 attendees for the
whole conference.
Attendees interested in modeling knew about Sirius, the most I
met had tried it (or did so during the tutorial) and they all
knew what Sirius was about and what problems it fixes.
We had an informal BOF session: discussing with adopters,
showing what can be done and we even had a demo of a modeler
built with Sirius by the EMF Parlsey team which was very cool!
That's also the first year so many people came to me during
EclipseCon just for saying that they love Sirius. Digging
further, what they like the most is:
- First and foremost is the productivity. They could get the
result they wanted in very little time.
- Second is the quality of the tooling they get, those many
"small" yet important features that their users are discovering
when using their own modelers.
- Sirius + Xtext working together is also perceived as a strong
asset. BTW I also discussed with the Xtext team and new things
are coming in the next version which can notably improve the
experience, the serialization for instance is getting an
important performance boost...
- This one I did not expect: some had to extend quite a lot the
default behavior, regarding layout in particular, and found that
it was way easier to do so in Sirius than when they had their
own GEF/GMF modeler. That is an illustration of the fact that
we should not forget that java API, even way more complex than
specifying in the .odesign editor are still a valid and
efficient answer for many users.
- The "seamless upgrade" of the .odesign model is also really
appreciated and helped users in moving quicker on the new
version. We said it, now they have been experiencing it several
times and like it.
All this feedback was filled with excitement, congrats to the
team for such a success ! Some also mentioned the excellent
support on the forum or bugzilla. Keep up the good work!
I also asked about areas to improve and the most common requests
were related to the .odesign tooling and getting capabilities to
debug the specification. Queries are seen as indeed a powerful
mechanism yet something which can get quite hard to get right
(even when starting with AQL). The package.Type and
package::Type mismatch came up several times during the tutorial
leading to non-working queries.
Also some areas in the .odesign editor are still pretty poor
regarding the validation (style customization for instance).
Some users did not even know about the "validate" action to
check a query. They do "manage" though as you can iterate very
quickly with "try something, see if it works, try a new way".
The "problem view" error reporting was not even known.
The discoverability of what you can do is also a problem for
many specifiers. It was mentioned that a generic action to
create "New.." Then ask the type, then ask where in the .odesign
model to put it could help in some cases...
That being said, the focus on the features targeting the end
user vs the specifier is appreciated.
A "Create a Viewpoint Specification project from Ecore files"
wizard providing default diagrams based on an EClass entry point
was also mentioned quite a few times. They have that in Xtext
and that's highly appreciated as a means to get started.
On the "end user" side the lack of a proper .aird editor
(meaning: useful and declared as an editor in Eclipse) clearly
impairs the use of the toolings in perspectives which are not
"Modeling".
The new properties view support has been really well received
and is important for 90℅ of those users. That's consistent with
what we've seen on the Sirius Forum lately. Mélanie and Stéphane
gathered more specific feedback on the properties view.
I had quite a few mentions of "Eclipse Sirius on Che" by users
and we discussed possible paths that we could take to reach
integration of the two technologies. I still have quite a few
open questions, but something really nice could be done. Anybody
interested in funding a prototype or working on it can contact
me.
All in all a lot of positive signs and a great event! Feel free
to track bugzillas related to this feedback if you want to get
some changes considered for the next release (I'm just too tired
and with a connectivity which is too low to do it right now).
Next step is SiriusCon on the 15th of November, the future is
looking good!
--
Cédric
Brun
CTO
+33 2 51 13 51 42
@bruncedric
7 Boulevard Ampère - Carquefou -
France
obeo.fr
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