Eclipse Modeling Framework

[Joe Pluta]

Welcome Eclipse Modeling Framework authors!
I like the fact that when I click on your book on Amazon.com, it provides a "people who bought this book also bought..." link to my book .
Anyway, a couple of questions. To start with, EMF is a plugin to Eclipse and as such has some tutorial documentation and the like. Do you recommend going through that (especially the tutorial) prior to reading your book?
Second, I dont quite understand the development flow. The obvious direction is from UML to Java, but is there bidirectional capability? Can I make changes in the generated Java code and get them back into the UML?
Joe

[Deep Chand]

May be it is one of the dumbest questions ever. I just browsed through the initial pages of EMF book on amazon.com...looks cool...Is this EMF plugin available for free?
Thanks,
Deep

[Joe Pluta]

Not a dumb question at all, Deep! I was checking that out myself . From what I can tell, EMF is a free plugin. Not only that, unless I'm mistaken, it's open source, which means we can peek under the covers!
Joe

[Juan Rolando Prieur-Reza]

Originally posted by Joe Pluta:
... direction is from UML to Java, but is there bidirectional capability? Can I make changes in the generated Java code and get them back into the UML?...

I'm throwing in my own sombraro on this question. It seems to me that any respectable IDE must provide full reverse-engineering capabilities.

[Frank Budinsky]

Hi all.
EMF is indeed an open source sub-project at eclipse. You can download the runtime and source code for free from the emf project web site.
As far as getting started, the overview documents and tutorials available from the emf web site are just as good a starting point as the book, although I think chapter 2 of the book is the best overall introduction to what EMF is all about. Fortunately you can read chapter 2 before you buy the book, because its the excerpt chapter at amazon.com.
EMF definitely supports modification/roundtripping of generated code. EMF is really intended to integrate modeling with programming (see chapter 2) like never before, so hand modification of generated classes is not only allowed - it's expected.
Frank.

[Joe Pluta]

Eclipse 3.0 is going to have significant impact, especially on plugins. Do you know whether the EMF project is working on this issue already, and what effect it might have on EMF?
Joe

[Dave Steinberg]

Joe,
We're already hard at work on EMF 2.0, and we've been using the Eclipse 3.0 milestone builds for that. The switch was very smooth, so we don't anticipate any significant problems for EMF users at this point.
Cheers,
Dave

[Bill Dudney]

Hi All,
For what its worth I have been using EMF for about 3 weeks and I love it. I have just over 20 classes modeled and I've done lots of round tripping.
The book was great to get me started and I am going back to if often to jog the gray matter.
All in all a great package.
Quick Question: I'd like to run my model outside of eclipse along with (I think anyway) the EMF.Edit generated code. I have been successful in runnin the model alone (with the instructions from the book) but I have not tried the .Edit stuff yet. What I'm trying to do is build a Swing UI that can edit my EMF model. Any guidance would be appreciated.

[Ed Merks]

To use EMF.Edit or your .edit plugins outside of Eclipse you need to make sure that plugin.properties files and icons subdirectory are visible on the classpath as if they appear in the directory/package of the XyzEditPlugin class in the .edit plugin. The EMF plugins with a runtime jar of the form xyz.resources.jar are there for use on the standalone classpath. For your generated .edit plugin, you can copy the plugin.properties and the icons folder to the folder/package of the XyzEditPlugin for a builder to pick up.

[Bill Dudney]

Thanks Ed,
So if I understand correctly I need to have access to the generated .edit stuff (i.e. the plugin.xml etc) and the *.resources.jar files in all the emf plugins?

[Ed Merks]

Bill, you need access only to plugin.properties (containing string resources) and to the icons folder (containing image resources), but not the plugin.xml or anything other than the .class files. You'll also need the jars in those EMF plugins that your plugins depend on.