Frank Budinsky

Michal,
Hopefully we'll get to this relatively soon. We're a pretty busy team.
Frank.

Originally posted by Dave Hewy:
I remember EMF from physics lessons years ago.
It's Electro Motive Force !

There's also Electric and Magnetic Fields for you Electrical Engineering types. Ours is clearly the coolest though ... dont you think?

Jay, see the thread titled: Eclipse console output.
Frank.

Joe,
The book doesn't include specific information about how to implement RDB support for EMF but between the book, the emf newsgroup, and poking through the code, a "truly insane person" should be able to figure it out.
From the emf newsgroup, I've gotten the impression that several people are already playing around with this kind of thing. We also are doing some prototyping in this area ourselves, but we aren't ready to commit to releasing anything yet.
For your editing XML question, there is an EMF-generated sample editor that we provide with EMF that can be used to edit EMF generated XML files.
Frank.

Originally posted by Joe Pluta:
I use WebSphere Studio all the time (I use WDSC, which includes the iSeries extensions). Where might I see EMF in action there?
Joe

Joe, it's sort of like seeing your house foundation in action EMF is used as the underlying data model for most of the tools in WebShere, so if it's up and running, you're seing EMF in action. Their are EMF models for EJB, RDB, XML, DTD, XMLSchema, WSDL, among others. There's also a generic EMF mapping model used by all of the mapping tools. The EJB to RDB mapping tool and the XML transformation tool are pretty visible EMF examples.

JAXB defines a mapping from XML Schema to Java. Since EMF allows you to define a model in XML Schema and then generate Java for it, it overlaps with what JAXB is doing. As Ed mentioned in his previous post, he is participating in the JAXB expert group to try to keep EMF in sync with JAXB as much as possible, even though EMF larger vision than just XML to Java mapping.

Joe, yes the book covers headless (command line) invocation of the generator.
Frank.

Joe, one issue to keep in mind is that the EMF code generator uses the eclipse JDT, so to run it, you need at least a headless eclipse workbench. The EMF runtime can run completely standalone, but not the generator - you'll need some eclipse jar files as well.

Joe,
Everything you need to run EMF is available on the EMF download page, i.e., the same one you pointed at in your post (notice that the XSD runtime is available for download along with the EMF zip files). JET is included in the EMF zip files. I'm assuming you already have the eclipse platform - if not you'll first need to download it from the eclipse download site.
The book has no CD, but there is a companion web site that includes all the example plugins used throughout the book.

The book has more coverage of the JET-based EMF generator and its model (GenModel), than JET itself, but we do also describe JET templates in chapter 11.
By the way, there is another JET tutorial (Part 2) available now.

Most of the really functional EMF-based plugins are part of IBM's WebSphere Studio, so you can't download them for free.
One really powerful EMF-based project is the XML Schema model and sample editor of the XSD technology project at eclipse.

Michal, this is pretty close to true with EMF. Take a look at chapter 2 and Omondo's EclipseUML to see what's possible.
Frank.

Joe,
Included in the EMF project is a template-based code generation framework called JET. JET itself, while packaged along with EMF, is actually a general purpose framework that is independent of EMF and is being used for several other non-EMF purposes. There are two eclipse corner articles about JET that you might want to look at. The first article is a basic introduction. The second one describes how to use the generator framework classes to generate code.
As far as template location is concerned, the EMF generator uses compiled forms of the templates (they're JSP-like things), but users can request the generator use dynamic templates and specify a template directory where they provide overrides of any of the templates that they want to change. This is covered in chapter 11 of the book.
Frank.

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.

Thanks Bhushan. It's great to be here.
We're surprised ourselves by how many eclipse users haven't heard of EMF. Once people hear about it, we usually get very favorable feedback ... but getting the word out about how generally applicable it is, is harder than we expected.
Frank.