GMF Tooling is back in the train

Unfortuantely, GMF Tooling did not have enough resources to get in the latest Indigo release traine.

GMF-Tooling and Indigo...

However, this was just an exception: GMF Tooling is already back on the Juno train! In order to be more reactive to the release train requirement, GMF Tooling moved its build to Tycho, making the build system quite easy to maintain, and release train rythm much easier to follow.

Thanks to Tycho, GMF-Tooling is already in the train

And you can see it here:alrea

GMF Tooling in Juno

Then you won’t have to search a lot in order to get GMF Tooling in Juno.

Refreshing GMF documentation

Da Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) has ever been an amazing, very productive and powerful project to generate diagram for models based on EMF. However, I recently read several things and forums or had some chatting with people that make me think GMF is difficult to use for newcomers. GMF is not that complicated to understand and use, but the feedbacks I got show that it is not easy to get it, it can be a blocking issue for some potential users. The question is “what can we do to make it easier for people to consume GMF?”.

The first answer I have is in refactoring documentation to show more “Getting started” tutorials. Then people need to spend less time to find a way to get started.

What you see on the main GMF wiki page

Also, I thought the tutorial was too monolithic. There are a lot of things you can do with GMF, but not all will be useful for your use-case. Users need to clearly understand what use case of piece of documentation actually resolves, in order either to skip it, or to spend more time on it. This can be achieved by reorganizing the titling of the documentation. Then it becomes easier to find out what are the different steps when creating a diagram, which ones you can skip, which ones interest you.

Structured organization and titling

Finally, by digging into current GMF documentation, I discovered that GMF has lots and lots of resources to help people to leverage it. There are several tutorials, including one that includes Flash videos to show how to generate a diagram. This is a very-high value resource, but it was unfortunately not very easy to find. This resource deserved to be highlighted! A sad thing is that (AFAIK) there is currently no way to integrate these movies into the wiki. I hope Bug 352735 gets fixed soon so that people will really benefit from these tutorials without effort.

If you know anything you could improve to the refreshed documentation, please do it. Remember of your first experience with GMF or of the first time you met a classical use-case: How did you search answer? How could the answer be easier to find? How could the answer be easier to understand? What in the documentation makes it less efficicent? If you have ideas, feel free to edit the documentation accordingly.

I learnt a few lessons from this work:

• Very new users are really the people to target for tutorials.
• For tutorials, a video is more attractive and efficient than 5 pages of documentation.
• Do not try to be exhaustive in tutorials, prefer being modular or pluggable, so that the tutorial remains easy to follow, and that people can extend it by adding a sub-sub-title. It will make the tutorial easier to maintain, without making it easier to read (people are able to skip your “tutorial modules”)
• Make your tutorial incremental. Resolve use-case one after the other. Be very explicit about the use-case. People need to understand where and why you go before reading the “How”
• Sometimes, there is alreadly a lot of documentation available, there is no need for more. Instead, it can be useful to spend time on organizing documentation and making it more visible. A documentation that nobody finds or reads is very sad, it is waste.

These are my very first steps with documentation, and my first thoughts after working a little bit on GMF documentation. There are probably some things you’d like to tell me on this topic according to your experience. I’d be glad to learn from you, please tell me

Back on Grenoble Demo Camp

The first Eclipse DemoCamp in Grenoble took place on Tuesday. With 25 attendees, it was a very good opportunity to meet people who are well-known in the Eclipse community, but also some new people who start using Eclipse to develop plugins to resolve very interesting use-cases.

Here is a small summary of the event (Thanks to Adrian for the pictures).

Agenda

First, Adrian welcomed us at the Xerox Research Europe castle. A very nice place!

View Larger Map

Then the event was made of 2 parts.

Eclipse projects

The first one consisted in presenting new stuff at Eclipse. Of course, Indigo, but also to give news about some other projects.

I started by giving some insight about “What’s new in Indigo?” to the audience, and then to present a demo of WindowBuilder. I hope I convinced almost everybody to use this project I personally love!

Me presenting the Runtime Packaging Project

Then my former dear colleague Aurélien prensented and demonstrated to the audience how they could leverage the Memory Analyzer tools to resolve memory issues in there applications. Slides are here.

"You need a snapshot of your memory"

Next, Vincent , my new colleague since I joined PetalsLink, presented 2 projects of the SOA landscape at Eclipse: the SCA editor, and the BPEL designer, which is coming back to life at Eclipse and is going to join the SOA top-level project very soon.

Vincent explaining what is SCA and demo'ing the editor

Aurélien and I closed the first part of the event by presenting an overview of the Modeling stuff at Eclipse. I liked presenting it, so that I submitted a presentation about Modeling at Eclipse to Devoxx, if it gets accepted, it will include more demonstrations and will be improved thanks to the feedback people gave us during the DemoCamp!

It was the time for a break! Adrian came with beverages and very good food such as macaroons. I love macaroons. Unfortunately, there is no picture of this break, but people really looked satisfied of speaking one and other, and of drinking and eating.

Case studies

The second part of the DemoCamp was dedicated to case-studies: showing to people what people do with Eclipse and how they achieve their goals.

First one to present a case-study was Aurélien (again! who highlighted the main Modeling features of the “Best Eclipse Modeling Application” Bonita Open Solution, and who explained what are the tricks used by Bonita to customize GMF Editors. See slides.

Aurélien and Bonita Open Solution

Next, Marc Dutoo (my first Eclipse mentor who made me a committer on JWT while I was a trainee) from Open Wide presented us the EasySOA research project, in which one the leverage several Eclipse SOA technologies to make consumption of services easier.

Marc explaining the goals of EasySOA

The following presentation was a presentation of Xeproc, a model that they use at Xerox to process documents. Thierry Jacquin explained us the use-case of Xeproc, which they use to discover how documents are structured and extract some meta-informations from them, and Adrian explained us how he plans to make it interacting with several SOA projects at Eclipse, using Mangrove.

Adrian explaining how Mangrove can be used as a pivot for all SOA technologies

Both last presentations were proposed by guys from IsandlaTech. and came to present solution for their daily work with Eclipse. Olivier Gattaz started by explaining us that they use a lot the spellchecking in Eclipse, mainly to write documentation; and started by telling us what are the limit of current spellchecker in Eclipse for his use-cases. Then he introduced us the Hunspell4Eclipse project, available on Eclipse MarketPlace, that provides an implementation of spell-checking in Eclipse that is the same as in Firefox or Libre Office. It was very interesting, and doing this work, Olivier discovered some issues in the JDT editor that I hope will be fixed one day! (slides)

Olivier convincing us to use Hunspell4Eclipse

And the last speaker was Thomas Calmant, who demonstrated us the ReST Editor, which is a very smart (maybe the smartest) editor for reStructuredText, a language to create documentation widely used in the Python community. This editor is full of very nice features that makes editing of reStructuredText much more comfortable that with a basic text editor. Click here for the slides!

Lessons I learnt

• Eclipse DemoCamp are cool events to meet people
• Eclipse DemoCamp are cool events to discover new Eclipse use case
• Eclipse DemoCamp are cool events to be a speaker
• Eclipse DemoCamp are cool useful for the life of the community
• Modeling is not an easy thing to present, but it is quite interesting to do it. Everyone likes at least one thing in the Modeling landscape at Eclipse.
• Xerox offices looks like an holiday center
• It is not always for people who develop plugins to find how to get an influence on big Eclipse projects. People who have been involved for a while do know that everything starts with participating in forums and opening bugs, but it is not so obvious for newcomers. It is our role as member of the community to guide them, and to recruit them in the community. DemoCamps are perfect events for that.
• According to the audience of this DemoCamp, a lot of people really like GMF, but find this very difficult to use it. The documentation is very weak compared to the power of the project. That’s why I spent some time refactoring the Tutorial. The objective is to make GMF an easy-to-use project. You feedback is welcome.

Thanks to everyone who participated to this event! See you next year (and why not before) !

Grenoble Eclipse DemoCamp is next week!

Hi everybody!

For those who are living in French Alps, in Lyon area, or even in Geneve area, here is a reminder for an important event that takes place for the first time in Grenoble: an Eclipse Demo Camp! We’ll celebrate the latest release of Eclipse: Indigo.

Xerox Research Center Europe, where the DemoCamp takes place.

With this Demo Camp, you’ll have the opportunity to see some demos of what’s new in Indigo, some presentations and demonstrations about some famous tools of Eclipse you might never had the opportunity to try, and last but not least, to chat together between people who are interested or involved in Eclipse development in the area.

The event takes place on Tuesday June 28th, during the afternoon. You can register either on the wiki page of the event, or using the EventBrite ticket system. For the hottest news, you can foolow the Twitter account of the DemoCamp. Amd rememver: all that for FREE!

I hope I’ll meet some of you there!

A new blog

Hi all,

Welcome to my new blog! This blog will be dedicated to technical software development stuff, especially about Eclipse plug-in development. Then if you are looking around for pictures of Justin Bieber, just pass your way, what you’ll read here will probably be too serious for you.

Justin Bieber

Here is a more precise description of this blog.

About me

First, if you are really curious, I’m going to introduce myself: my name is Mickael Istria, 25, live in Grenoble, France. I am currently working as an Eclipse RCP developer at BonitaSoft. I have been doing Eclipse development since I left school. I started by becoming a contributor and then a committer on the Java Workflow Tooling project while I was a trainee of Marc Dutoo in a French services company called Open Wide. I mainly worked on Release Engineering (build and all other tooling stuff) in order to get it part of the Galileo release train. And it worked! After that I had the opportunity to join BonitaSoft, the publisher of the Open-Source BPM (Business Process Management) suite Bonita Open Solution. I work as part of the 8-people R&D team, and I am in charge with 2 to 3 other guys of developing the Eclipse RCP GMF-based Studio of the solution, which is an advanced BPMN editor. For this I could leverage a lot of Eclipse technologies, so that I could become a small contributor on several projects. But the heart of this application is the Modeling, then by contributing regularly to Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework, I became a committer on GMF-Tooling, the part of GMF that is responsible for generating a full diagram with a very little time of configuration. Our team won the Eclipse award of the Best Modeling Application during last EclipseCon. That is a remarkable award, and I am very proud with the rest of the team to be able to get such a distinction.

Currently, my focus on Eclipse projects is to make it easier to contribute to GMF (Tooling). Then I currently spend some time to move this project to Tycho, since I find it too difficult to contribute without an easy way to build and test locally with the current build system.

About this blog

Now, let’s speak about what is the purpose of this blog: It is more or less the continuity of the blog articles I’m used to write on BonitaSoft community blog. It will contain some tricks about Eclipse, and will also contain some evangelisation on the projects I like. I will also try to use it in order to get more feedback from the community of users of projects I’m implied in. It will also probably be a good place for some technical or strategical debates and to discuss about things non-technical things related to software development (methodology, agility, business…). I start this blog in order to be able to write things independently on the company I work for. As I already wrote, this blog won’t only be a set of encyclopedic articles, I’d like to make it a tool to interact with people, as it is the case for a lot of other Eclipse blogs I’m used to read.

To sum it up, this blog is a way to get closer from other people in the Eclipse community. I hope you’ll like it, and if you don’t just tell me, it is an open place for communication.

Blog in progress

This blog is not yet ready-to-go. I’ll soon update it to post stuff related to Eclipse development, among other things. But for the moment, there is nothing to read here. See post on http://www.bonitasoft.org/blog/author/mickael-istria-eclipse/ .

Stay tuned!