Review of Eclipse Modeling Tools in Ganymede (RC4)

2008-06-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

Ganymede is the annual release for 2008 of several major Eclipse projects (24 to be precise) all at once. This annual coordinate release cycle was introduced in 2006, with the launching of Callysto followed in 2007 by Europa.

Hint: so far the naming convention for the annual releases is based on Jupiter's moons, specially the Galilean moons, so could we expect that next 2009 release be called Io?

I've following the evolution of Eclipse from the very begining, although I wasn't a user at that time. It always looked to me as a promising application, and I guess as time goes by, it proved to be more than an application, but an ecosystem itself.

Fortunately, in the last 3 years I progressively start to use Eclipse, both for Java and specially for C++ development. So I'm really used to projects CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) and JDT (Java development tools) and I considered them to be stable and very capable. So I decided to start taking a look at other projects available for Eclipse, so I'll try to review just briefly in this instance the Eclipse Modeling Project. I consider that the next natural step in the evolution of programming languagues will come from the modeling side. i.e., the idea to have a concrete model of the system under development that can at any time represent directly what is actually coded and implemented. I expect (maybe I'm wrong... I never won the lottery so far!) that model-based development technologies will be used more and more, specially in big projects involving lots of developers and hundreds of modules...

Installation
For this review of Ganymede I chose the Windows version of Eclipse Modeling Tools. I downloaded the .zip file from here and uncompressed it in C:\. The whole package will be installed under C:\eclipse

Note: Ganymede can be installed also starting from a previous Europa installation, and making an update using the built-in update system of Eclipse, available through Help > Software Updates. Select tab Available Software and then click the Ganymede Update Site entry to see a list of all the available features (modules) that are part of the Ganymede release. After choosing what features to install, it's a question of time for the download and automatic installation of the updated/new features. See Package details for a list of all installed components.

UML2
From the components listed above, I'll use UML2 as a starting point for reviewing the Modeling Tools. I expect to be able to draw the fundamental UML diagrams to my opinion: Class, Sequence and Use Case. I would also like to reverse engineer an existing Java project (to have it better documented and to have a picture to see the project at a glance).

Conclusion
The simultaneous release of a is a bright idea. It allows the developers to keep their Eclipse environment up to date without worries about components or projects versions. And with every annual release, more and more projects are included into Eclipse, making it the IDE of choice for software developers who want to be more productive and produce better applications.

Eclipse Ganymede

Review of Eclipse Modeling Tools in Ganymede (RC4)