Modeling Amalgamation Project Proposal
This proposal is presented in accordance with the Eclipse Development Process and is written to declare the project's intent and scope as well as to solicit additional participation and feedback from the Eclipse community. You are invited to join the project and to provide feedback using the newsgroup.
Introduction
The Eclipse Modeling Project (EMP) was formed as a top-level project at Eclipse in order to bring together a number of modeling-related projects. While the Modeling project has been a success in many respects, it remains somewhat a collection of individual projects with little or no focus on integration or ease-of-use. As stated in the EMP charter, the "Eclipse Modeling Project will focus on the evolution and promotion of model-based development technologies within the Eclipse community. It will unite projects falling into this classification to bring holistic model-based development capabilities to Eclipse." While the task of unification is underway, the task of promotion is hindered by difficult installation, lack of integration, and poor usability. The intention of the Modeling Amalgamation project proposal is to augment the current Modeling project with one focused solely on refining the "user experience" when using Modeling project technologies.
Project Scope
The Amalgamation project will provide integrations and improved packaging of Modeling projects, through the use of product definition builds and the Eclipse Packaging Project. Configurations will be driven by community demand and offer additional usability offerings when working with several Modeling projects. Specifically, the Amalgamation project will provide:
- Modeling package downloads with update site for commercial vendor consumption of modeling technologies
- A Modeling product download with focus on "toolsmith" functionality (e.g. EMF/GMF/M2M/M2T/TMF SDKs)
- A Modeling product download with focus on "practitioner" functionality (e.g. UML diagramming)
- A unified set of modeling capability definitions with Welcome screen activation/deactivation
- A Modeling project type with facilities to add/remove modeling-related natures and builders
- Integration and UI features that don't "fit" within individual Modeling projects
It is believed that a considerable number of bugs will be submitted to the underlying Modeling projects as the result of such an effort, leading to the improved quality, user interface, commercial adoption, and end user ease-of-use that is expected of all Eclipse projects.
Note that this project proposal does not fit within the current scope of the Modeling project charter, and therefore will require PMC approval, followed by Board approval, for its addition to the Modeling project.
Project Organization
The project will be hosted within the top-level Modeling project, with CVS module /csvroot/modeling/org.eclipse.amalgam at dev.eclipse.org, newsgroup, amalgam-dev mailing list, build, download, and update site.
Interested Parties
The following individuals have expressed interest in supporting the Modeling Amalgamation project through contribution:
- Richard Gronback - Borland Software Corporation (proposed Project Lead)
- Ian Buchanan - Borland Software Corporation
- Sven Efftinge - Independent
- Bernd Kolb - Independent
- Peter Friese - Gentleware
The following individuals/organizations have expressed their support for the project:
- openArchitectureWare - Markus Voelter, et al