Building a tool for engineers based on EMF | EclipseCon Europe 2018
52EclipseCon Europe 2018
Ludwigsburg, Germany · October 23 - 25, 2018
https://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2018
Speaker(s):
Jonas Helming (EclipseSource Munich)
https://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2018/sessions/building-tool-engineers-based-emf
You want to develop a tool with more than code editing? You want to allow experts to configure or describe complex systems, such as cars, chips, machines, software systems, insurance contracts, power plants or something similar? You want to do that in an efficient and well-proven way? Join this talk and learn how the EMF ecosystem can help you with this endeavor!
Eclipse is well known to create tools for software engineers with a focus on code editing. However, in many domains, experts need to describe complex systems in a structured way (a.k.a. modeling), rather than writing code. This data is the input for many processes, e.g. generating documents, source code, construction plans, cost calculation or domains specific artifacts. While many projects still rely on Excel, customized tools can help to more efficiently create, maintain, validate and process the data.
Every domain and project has has typically its specific data model, however, cross-cutting requirements are often very overlapping between domains, e.g. displaying, modifying, sharing, versioning or comparing data.
EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) and its ecosystem provides a robust and incredibly powerful platform for such domain-specific tools. In this talk, we present a well-proven combination of EMF, EMF Compare, EMF Client Platform and EDAPT, which allows to develop custom tools in a highly efficient way. Due to the reuse of existing frameworks, many cross-cutting requirements such as editing, undo/redo, validation and versioning will work out of the box. Because slides are not to be trusted, we will show a consistent live demonstration building a new application based on EMF from scratch, along with technical details about the used components.
This talk is geared towards EMF newbies and should provide a good jumpstart to use EMF and related technologies in your next tooling project.