Papyrus UML - the first stage of a journey to the cloud
3Do you ever wonder what a cloud-based future of powerful UML and SysML tools look like and how to potentially migrate tools such as Papyrus to a web-based technology stack? We did, so we conducted a large evaluation project together with the group of Dominik Bork (Business Informatics Group at the Vienna University of Technology) to explore promising paths towards a full-fledged cloud-ready UML tool based on a modern technology stack and platform, such as Eclipse Theia or VSCode. Join this talk and learn about the results, findings and lessons learned of a large UML tool migration project!
In this talk, we will demonstrate the first version of a UML tool like Papyrus running in the browser. We discuss our findings, learnings, and experiences from an exploration project towards enabling on a modern web-based technology stack in VSCode and Theia, the powerful feature set that Eclipse Papyrus provides. The basis for this project was a technology mix of EMF.cloud model server, Eclipse GLSP, and many traditional Eclipse technologies, such as Eclipse UML, EMF, etc.
We will cover our findings about a viable overall architecture to foster reuse of the existing UML implementation, but also the trade-offs in re-use vs. leveraging the power of the new technologies, such as GLSP, SVG, and HTML. This involves questions, such as where complex UML edit commands are implemented, especially if they are invoked across multiple diagram types and different views, how auto-completion of UML types and UML libraries is implemented, how diagrams are serialized and kept in sync with the model, and how more flexibility is provided to the user in styling their diagram elements individually.
We will also talk about where these new technologies still pose challenges and where they shine; this includes technical aspects but also the learning curve that developers face . To round up things with a glimpse at the future, we will show the results of this exploration project and sketch the future paths to push Eclipse UML tools into a new era.