Long time not posting here. I've had a lot of work and nothing really interesting to post. I just inform you that I will make a speech about Wisss during the Acceleo Day in Nantes, at L'école des Mines, next friday at 2:30 pm. More information at : http://2009.rmll.info/Eclipse-Acceleo-Day-Presentation,938.html http://www.acceleo.org/wiki/index.php/EclipseAcceleoDay:Program

Currently I've not much time to work on Wisss :-( However, I will make a tiny dsl and generator to have a virtualhost file generated (independent from Wisss, which already generate a vhost). I've already done this with a shell script but it will be more powerful and easy to ...

You might have noticed some signs of excitement from us lately, one being the following tweet :

4:45 pm : I'm clicking on "send" and it's gonna rock.
— Cédric Brun (@bruncedric) 6 mars 2013

What was sent at 4:45pm? a new project proposal for Eclipse, one which, in my opinion, is a major event.

Let me introduce you to Eclipse Sirius !

Have you ever wanted a nice graphical environment customized for your domain data but been discouraged by the complexity of all the technologies needed to create one? Maybe you compromised and decided to use an existing format or notation, even if it does not completely fit your needs, just to benefit from the associated tools. Fear no more! Instead of adapting your needs to some existing tool, with Sirius the tooling adapts itself to you, as it should be. And you don't even need to learn about the Eclipse Modeling stack, we did it for you.

That said, if you want to tweak something you can always plug your customization in through the underlying frameworks, namely : GMF, GEF, EMF and the Eclipse Platform.


How did it all start ?

It's no vaporware. We started the development of Sirius a few years ago with Thales. We've set-up together a great team to build this technology, known as Doremi at that time.


Thanks to this collaboration, we've reached a very high level of maturity: Sirius is used in many very large projects within Thales and it's been around in Obeo Designer for a few years already. It is also the foundation of several tools you can already find in the Eclipse Marketplace, some of them being installed by more than 2000 users a month.


We are not kidding.

This contribution to Eclipse means a whole new team will become commiters. They have been working on Sirius for years and you already know them as contributors. You will now see those guys from Thales and Obeo co-leading and working in the open.

What about Obeo Designer ?

Sirius is one Obeo Designer's components. Once published via Eclipse the Sirius open source version will be included in Obeo Designer.

Sirius being open-source doesn't change much besides strengthening Obeo Designer by significantly growing the user base of one of its components. This means more diverse usages, more tests "in the wild" and potentially more designers to reuse or extend.

Obeo Designer remains a commercial product : a strong and open platform to build and deploy your modeling environment with well integrated and tested components. It is the perfect companion for professional usage by bringing collaborative modeling and support.

Why ?

First because it is in our DNA, we strive to build great products in the open. And our partners are supporting us on this, especially Thales, since Sirius is the result of many years of a joint and rich collaboration with Obeo.

Secondly to unleash the energies in Eclipse Modeling. There is a lot of interest in this domain,  companies are in dire need of solutions but the cost to fill the gap between what they need and what Eclipse Modeling provides right now is too high. We are reducing this gap with Sirius and this will trigger more usage and more funding for Eclipse Modeling as a whole.

We also want to work with you, fellow commiters and OSS tool providers, in building the best tools ever. We are building a great component, but having a non open-source runtime may slow down its adoption. This last barrier is now gone.

Have some questions ?
I'm sure you have tons of them. Please use the dedicated Eclipse forum.

Want to know more ?

I'll be at EclipseCon Boston next week. At 1:30 pm On Tuesday .

I'll present the project with Stephane Bonnet from Thales in the session :

"Your custom modeling environment definition made easy. At last !"

During this session you'll learn about the project, its goals, its current deployments and you'll see it in action with live demos.

I will also introduce the project during the Modeling Symposium later the same day !

Sirius brings you the ability to quickly define your dedicated editors : diagram, tree, tables, it would be a shame not to show you what you can do with it :


 

I don't know about you, but at Obeo we're preparing for EclipseCon North America. Eclipse Conferences are great, so many things are built on top of Eclipse or within the Eclipse projects. Tooling of course, but also rich applications, runtimes, you can get a clear vision of what's going on in these areas in just a few days being there.  You could think : "all right, but he is an Eclipse commiter, of course Eclipse conferences are interesting to him". Actualy I'm also CTO at Obeo and when Obeo comes at EclipseCon it's not a one man trip. Seven people from Obeo will go this year to Boston, it's not unusual, and for a company like us it's no small investment.
So, with my CTO hat (and not the Eclipse commiter one) let me give you a hint : its worth it !

During a few days your team is getting to learn from the source ! The community is so diverse, they will learn about developping mobile apps, web apps, rich applications, runtimes, but also about product management, tooling, business intelligence, quality, processes. They will learn tips and tricks on using technologies and in our world these tips are making the difference between a successful project and a complete failure. The knowledge you'll get is high quality:  you'll learn either from people using the technology day to day or from people actually building the technology !

Looking back at the few years the company have been around, there is no doubt Eclipse conferences had the most profound impact on how we use technology and how we develop products.

I'll take a few samples from what we are presenting there but make sure you have a look on the program yourself.

EMF Compare 2.0 : Scaling to Millions : performance and scalability related talks are in general giving a lot of insight into a technology. Here Mikaël will describe by which mechanisms Compare is now able to produce diffs from models too huge to even be completely loaded in memory and merge these diffs while keeping the model integrity.

EMF.Edit : the Force Unleashed : how EMF brings a flexible command support, and how you can use it even not how of an Eclipse context in for instance, a JavaFX application.  "This talk is dedicated to EMF rookies that know EMF as a generator of JavaBeans on Steroids and want to know more about steroids "

Documentation Driven Testing : if you think documentation is an important part of your software but you don't want to spend time doing it for nothing.

Buildroot Eclipse Bundle : a powerful IDE for Embedded Linux developers : see how Eclipse tools can help in building your complete embedded Linux system.

Stop Throwing your doc away : Agile Documentation with Mylyn Intent : you might learn there how the tools from Eclipse can save you a lot of time telling you where your documentation is not up to date.

And thats a tiny extract of the conference which has 7 parallel tracks during 3 days +  a full day of 3 hours tutorials.

And I am not even mentioning the discussions, the BOF sessions and the keynotes.

Well, of course you won't be able to send all your developers there. Just make sure to send those who are good at sharing knowledge with the others and you'll see it will impact both your software and your practices.

ps :  better hurry to register

A lot of things are being worked on for EMF Compare, and while we're polishing the core and refining the user-interface, a few new features have been included in the latest milestones. The biggest focus is on the graphical (GMF) comparison and displaying of differences:

Graphical Comparison

It's been a while since I mentionned that graphical comparison with EMF Compare 2 was coming. Well, the feature has been included as a preview in the M5 milestone of EMF Compare (which can be installed from this update site). We can now properly detect and merge graphical differences in GMF models.

However, we have now initiated a more thorough reflection on how to display these graphical differences. Our preliminary implementation is not satisfactory:
Should we use a custom color code or reuse the "team" colors (those that show on the icon's overlays), should be draw a rectangle "around" the differences or decorate the existing figure's borders, how can we best show that an element has been deleted?

We are trying to determine how these differences would be best displayed... and your opinion matters :). If you think you can help on this reflection, or wish to share any thought on this point, the specification of what we expect the graphical display to look like can be found on the wiki. We've initiated a thread on the compare forum for the discussion to take place for anyone interested.

Two special integration features for Papyrus and Ecoretools are also contributed, though these only include means to detect "label" differences and may be temporary: labels are computed when displayed, potentially from many distinct other features... thus detecting and merging them is very costly. For the technical, we have to create off-screen editparts and compare the labels textually. Merging requires calls to the direct edit tool when there is one. These integration features may not be kept in the final release.

User Interface

The second most visible change that's coming with this M5 milestone of EMF Compare is a deep modification of how differences are displayed in the structural view. In short, we previously had a very long sentence that tried to describe the changes in details:
While we have reduced this to the bare minimum useful information with this new version:
We expect that the simple label, along with the change icon (remote, local, conflict...), will be enough to understand what happened in the model. We add the name of the feature that actually changed along with the type of difference we detected as additional information.

The content viewers (the two/three panes displayed as the bottom half of the comparison editor) are also expected to change before Kepler is live. Namely, we are currently changing the way we show the differences in their context. Currently, the only context we offer is the list of siblings of the changed element:
For containment changes, this is quite disturbing, and we are changing that to display the whole tree instead (along with the other containment changes detected during this comparison:


Extensibility

EMF Compare is thought and implemented as a framework, and we are striving to provide all extensibility means that could be necessary to tweak, customize or replace the comparison and merging processes. I won't go in much detail here, more information on each possibility will be added to the wiki, or questions can be asked on the forum.

• Customize the comparison process: Most steps of the comparison process can be modified, be it the matching, differencing, detection of equivalences, detection of conflicts, resolution of the logical model...
• Custom mergers: We now provide an extensible merging framework so that extenders (or users) can alter the default behavior or contribute their own merging policy for either default or custom differences.
• Filtering or grouping differences: Differences displayed in the structural view can be filtered and/or grouped together. A number of default options are provided, but new ones can be added seamlessly through extension points.
• Customized user interface: There are a number of entry points to customize the user interface of EMF Compare. For example, the graphical comparison we were discussing above is entirely contributed to the EMF Compare UI as an extension. Clients can also tweak the labels and icons of the differences, contribute new toolbar actions, ... This is a part that still lacks good documentation, feel free to get in touch through the forum if you need more details on this.

When you model a system, you use a specific language (meta-model) to represent information. So, you use a particular language fitted to your business needs. It may be required to specialize this model giving a precise semantics on each object, but also to rise above it through other business concepts to read, understand, exploit it better or enhance it from different viewpoints. So, you can imagine to manage a requirements model which decorates/references/plugs in a design model allowing to check that this last one is conform to the specifications.

In the example below, I focus on the decoration of a UML model with a DSL (Domain Specific Language). The need was to configure a UML model (design of communicating components) and to test these configurations against code generation. Each configuration defines a combination of different and particular communication protocols to use on the connectors between components. And, of course, each protocol brings its own parameters which may be quite difficult to model directly on the UML model (with profile/stereotypes for e.g.) and which may involve structural impacts.

To define the DSL, I have chosen to create a generic language to address any model decorations or configurations. The aim is to base on a generic behavior in order to create easily new decoration concepts and to benefit from a set of wired facilities (At the level of meta-model implementation, decoration instantiation with its life-cycle management and code generation). I inspired from the principles of Architectural Description/Styles Language that I extremely simplified, defining two main concepts: a Configuration and a Parameter, a Configuration being able to own a set of parameters. For me, a Configuration or a Parameter are a kind of Decoration.

Then I extended this meta-model to define my own decoration in order to configure the UML model with the Ethernet protocol (use case presented below). So, I described an Ethernet Configuration which is a kind of Configuration and which applies on UML connectors. As Parameter of this Configuration, I defined the concept of Container which will be intended to federate the components communicating from each side of the connectors configured with this protocol. An IP address and port number have to be set on each Container.

What is presented below can be downloaded from the TopCased project: "UML to real time Java with RTSJ".

At the end of the video, I introduce how it is possible to strengthen the understanding of his configuration/architecture, approaching model decoration through graphical viewpoints (out of scope of TopCased project). For that, I rely on the free UML Designer, based on the Viewpoint technology of Obeo Designer, which can be installed from the Eclipse Marketplace and whose the configuration is Open Source. The interest of this designer is that it is easily integrable with other designers based on the same technology and easily extensible.

The use case can be watched here:


french version here

This puts in relief other benefits of model decoration.
Indeed, it enables to distinct the applicative preoccupations from the architectural ones and to make evolving the last ones easily without impacting the decorated model.
Then, it allows to apply, on the same model, different configurations, and so to be modular.
Besides, the readability of information is improved through a fit language, some wizards and suitable viewpoints.
At last, the UML model is not dependent from some configuration, and so it is more inter-operable. In the same way, the concepts of the decoration may evolve without impacts on the UML model.

We have had a number of questions regarding the diagram comparison support in EMF Compare 2. This is something that was (somewhat) provided with EMF Compare 1.3, but that we have yet to port to the new version of the APIs.

Well, the work is ongoing and preliminary support for diagram comparison is available in the current integration builds. The port was done in the context of the modeling platform working group and is mainly targetting Papyrus, though ecoretools diagrams (and plain GMF diagrams) should also be supported.

We have not fully settled down on how to represent deletions on a diagram, but this otherwise begins to take form :
Do note that this is still very rough, and merging some of these differences (mainly "label changes") graphically is still problematic, but we expect this to be fine-tuned for Kepler's release :).

Stay tuned!

After agile methods, devops, continuous integration, model driven development, ... here is coming the new awesome approach to improve quality and productivity: CHOCOLATE!

Here are the slides of my talk at EclipseCon Europe 2012.
I spoke about gamification, pleasure-based management, packaging tooling, continuous quality improvement, ... with  a common thread based on "choco-commit".

It was a challenge to use a fun way to explain so many different aspect of industrialization in software development.
Thanks for all the feedback I received about it.



I hope several of these ideas can help you improve the pleasure of making good softwares or can be useful to discover some Eclipse plug-in to simplify packaging and agile development.

Eclipse Juno has been released with plenty of new exciting features.
Of course, the most famous new feature is about the platform which is now based on the Eclipse 4.X main stream.
The New and  Noteworthy for Platform, JDT, PDE and Equinox explains all these new facilities.


For the Modeling project, the Annual Report resumes the main activities for this release:




The increasing popularity of modeling and model-driven development continues to be an important driver for the growth of Eclipse. The modeling ecosystem is active and diverse with commiters from more than 30 different companies. New projects are created with regularity and are inherently integrated by virtue of their reuse of EMF's core APIs.

• In 2012, modeling extends its community by addressing the need of a broad range of domains.
• DSLs for programming languages using Xtext's extensible expression language are exploited by Xcore, a textual syntax for EMF's Ecore and by Xtend, an concise JVM-based language. Both support rich textual editors reminiscent of JDT's Java editor.
• A DSL for business modeling with GMF 3.0 and EEF 1.1 that supports the creation of custom graphical and forms-based editors.
• Support OMG standards, including Acceleo 3.3 for code generation, OCL 4.0 with more efficient API and tooling, and support for the UML 2.4 and BPMN 2 specifications.
• Massively scalable deployment with CDO for collaborative and distributed repositories as well as EGF to manage the assembly of software factories.

With the launch of Juno, EMF will be in heart of Eclipse 4.2 SDK's workbench model. This is a great opportunity for end users to discover the various interesting modeling innovations.


DOWNLOAD
If you want to test Eclipse Modeling Juno, the Amalgamation project provides a bundle with the core Modeling plug-ins and a nice UI to discover Modeling tools hosted by Eclipse Foundation.

If you are in Washington for EclipseCon 2012, don't miss the "hot new product showcase".
It will start Wednesday, at 17:50.

You will see plenty of demos of new exciting technologies created with Eclipse projects.
Last year, I really enjoy it because:

• it's very easy to speak with the guys who created these products, 
• you are not stress because of the beginning of a talk
• you can see products, while talks are main focus on technologies
• the vibes is good, as there is a reception at the same place

This year, I'm proud to present there our DSL workbench: Obeo Designer.
One of our challenge we would like to do with our visitors: create in live, with only several minutes, a nice looking graphical designer customized with the visitor's choices.


To explain its features in a funny way, I made this original presentation:

Today is my last day in OBEO.

It's been a pleasure working with the team that created the Acceleo, EMF Compare, ATL and Intent Eclipse projects.
This has been an honor to work with the foundation about EEF.

I do not know now if my involvement will be as strong as now, but I will work in an environment where I should use eclipse modeling tools, so I do not make me worry.

Thank you to everyone I could be next to, thank you to everyone who helped me by mail or bugzilla and see you very soon!

Hi,

There it is, the move to Git repo is done.

The oldish CVS is marked read only, and the github repository will shows up in few days.

Next step, the move from EMFT to EMF !

Last month, Julien, from the INRIA Aoste team, has presented the RT-Simex project to the FSE conference (http://fse18.cse.wustl.edu/). The slides are available here : http://www.slideshare.net/fthomasfr/fsertsimex.

For those of you looking for the Acceleo presentation that I’ve realized last week during EclipseCon Europe 2011, you can now find it online.

I have also put online the presentation that I’ve done during the Eclipse Modeling symposium on the new Interpreter view available in Acceleo 3.2. A video of this presentation during the symposium is available on Dailymotion.

And now, after Twitter, the Acceleo community will also be available on Google+.

The modeling symposium at EclipseCon Europe 2011 was really nice with several talks on various topics related to modeling. I would like to thank all presenters and particularly István who filmed all presentations with his smartphone.

• Xtext 2.1 by Sven Efftinge
  
  
  
  
  
• OCL by Ed Willlink
  
  
  
  Slides are also available.
  
  
  
• Acceleo Interpreter by Stéphane Bégaudeau
  
  
  
  
  
• EMF-IncQuery by István Ráth
  EMF-IncQuery EclipseCon Europe 2011 Modeling Symposium Talk
  
  
  
• EMF Store Demo by Maximilian Koegel
  
  
  
  
  
• EMF Profiles by Hugo Brunelière
  
  
  
  
  
• MPS by Markus Völter
  
  
  
  
  
• EMF Compare by Mikael Barbero
  
  
  
  
  
• EEF alternative generation by Goulwen Le Fur
  
  
  
  
  
• GMF Tooling revival by Mariot Chauvin
  
  
  
  

Obeo has developed the Rolls Royce of the code generation. It's time to use this for the EMF generation tooling.

Since one year we are developping an alternative EMF generation with EEF. Now we have covered most of the EMF generation (even the model part!) and you can try it with the last EEF nighlty!


Here is the demonstration Stéphane made of the new wonderful feature:



For the ESE attenders, I will made a demo @ the modeling symposium this evening !

 To celebrate the historic victory of the french rugby team in the world cup quarter final, the Acceleo team is proud to announce its 3.2 release very soon.

Photo from NikRugby23

 

• We tackled performance problems in compilation. Acceleo is now as fast as Vincent Clerc, and even if you totally don't know who he is, you will appreciate the better reactivity of the tool.  

Screenshot of Acceleo Interpreter

Want to join the scrum  ? You could install a release candidate and give us feedback before the final release planned for October 24th.

This year, I will try to present two talks to EclipseCon Europe about the Extended Editing Framework (EEF) and more generally Eclipse Modeling : Scientific application redesign in oil industry with Eclipse Modeling and 25 min to take care of your end users with EEF!.

Scientific application redesign in oil industry with Eclipse Modeling

This first talk deals with a work we made with IFP energies nouvelles (IFPEN) for redesign a part of its platform OpenFlow. IFPEN develops and provides a platform aiming at creating scientific softwares for oil production industry. This platform offers several services like tools helping creation of graphical user interfaces or a communication framework to send data to supercomputers.


The communication part of the suite is fully operational but can be really improved, mainly in the way the communications are described. The work with IFPEN was to create a communication designer with EcoreTools and to generate all the communication layer of the IFPEN platform with Acceleo 3.


For this talk, I will be assisted by two persons of IFPEN and we will show you :

• The different elements of Eclipse Modeling we used to made this redesign
• A demonstration of the final Communication Designer
• And a demonstration of a second tool we made to create automatically GUI with EEF
  

25 min to take care of your end users with EEF!

The second talk I proposed is more EEF-centric. EEF has reached its version 1.0 and is no longer in incubation. The two years in incubation allowed the framework to be more and more robust and to be a real candidate to become the EMF.edit framework version 2.0!

I will try to focus this talk on a tutorial aspect to enable people attending the presentation to use EEF immediatly on their own use cases.
The talk will start with a short introduction of the project and will be followed by a first tutorial to get good looking properties view for a given metamodel defined with Ecore.
After a short presentation of the different kinds of generable GUI with EEF, a second tutorial will show how to create very usable form editors with the extension part of EEF.

I hope this description of the talks I've submitted around EEF convinced you and make you want to come to this wonderful event that is Europe EclipseCon !

My motivation are :

• to learn the langage 
• to be able to use this langage with the Eclipse Modeling Framework. In fact, if I succeed, the AltaRica model and all other models used during my critical systems developments (SysML, UML, EventB, Requirements, traceability) will be managed by the same common modelling framework. It will thus facilitate the interroperability ! 
• to learn the Eclipse-Based xText technology for which you can describe the AltaRica grammar and generate the Eclipse-integrated textual editor.

An extract from the xText AltaRica grammar

Syntax error detection

Completion proposals

The ARC compilation results when asking all the path to get count >=3

Next week the second edition on the Eclipse DemoCamp will take place at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes.

Even if Nantes is specialized in Eclipse modeling technologies, we have this year an existing program with a good mix of modeling and non-modeling talks.

6:15PM - 6:35PM: MoDisco & ATL (AtlanMod)

6:35PM - 6:55PM: EMF Facet (Mia-Software)

6:55PM - 7:15PM: EEF (Goulwen Le Fur, Obeo)

7:45PM - 8:05PM: Memory Analyzer (Zenika)

8:05PM - 8:25PM: Tycho (Pod Programming)

8:25PM - 8:45PM: EGit (Obeo)

8:45PM - 9:00PM: General Questions & Wrap-up

If you want to attend, please update the wiki page or contact me:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_DemoCamps_Indigo_2011/Nantes

Tomorrow (2011/05/31, at 3 pm Paris timezone), there will a webinar about EclipseCon 2011 and Eclipse Indigo focused on news and northworthy of the Eclipse ecosystem. For the first time, this webinar will be in French since it will target the large and active community of French Eclipse users and some of them are more comfortable with their native language ;)

Speakers are: Etienne Juliot, Cédric Brun, Mariot Chauvin, Mikaël Barbero, Frédéric Madiot.
You can register at: http://live.eclipse.org/node/1030



English abstract
EclipseCon 2011 was a great success with lots of announcements and exciting new projects.
If you could not got there or you didn't success to fork yourself to see every talks, this webinar will help you to have an overview of the event and the upcoming technologies for Eclipse Indigo.
As lots of materials on EclipseCon are already available in English and in a view to increase their visibility to the french community, this webinar will be in French.


Résumé en français
EclipseCon 2011 a été un grand succès avec beaucoup d'annonces et de nouveaux projets passionnants.
Si vous n'étiez pas sur place ou vous n'avez pas réussi à vous dédoubler vous pour voir toutes les conférences, ce webinar vous aidera à avoir un aperçu de l'événement et des technologies à venir pour Eclipse Indigo.
Comme beaucoup de documents sur EclipseCon sont déjà disponibles en anglais et en vue d'accroître leur visibilité à la communauté française, ce webinar sera en français.

Ce webinar durera une heure et sera présentée de manière chronologique, comme si vous étiez à Santa Clara du lundi au jeudi. Les orateurs sont exclusivement des commiteurs des projets de la fondation ou des orateurs à la conférence. En prévision de la sortie d'Eclipse 3.7 qui sortira en juin prochain, nous vous montrerons pourquoi cette version est la plus importante depuis plusieurs années en expliquant ses nouveautés : Orion, Eclipse 4, Virgo, Acceleo, WindowBuilder, Tycho, EEF, eGit, ...


UPDATE :

The webinar has been recorded and is available at  / La vidéo a été enregistrée à l'adresse :
http://live.eclipse.org/node/1030

Here are the slides / Voici les supports de présentation :

At EclipseCon 2010, I do an original talk about business model. I was very happy to see so many persons to listen a non-technical talk.
My goal wasn't to explain generalities about FOSS business models (a very good talk was done by Neelan Choksi, the president and COO of Tasktop, and is available at http://www.eclipsecon.org/2011/sessions/?page=sessions&id=2299).

My goal was to explain our own story, why we continually adapt our commercial offer (service or product), and how we succeed to find a nice way to make money with free software.
Eg: provide for free our code generation tooling, and selling legacy migration solutions!

I also explained how Eclipse Foundation help us to find a way to increase the visibility of our work (and so, to increase the number of leads).

If I want to describe cinematic between my webapp, which representation is the easiest to understand :

this one:

or this one :

At Eclipse Summit Europe 2010, I do a talk to explain how Modeling can be useful to design JavaEE based applications:

• how to create some textual and graphical DSL for each layers of my webapp,
  
• how to create Acceleo based code generators for Hibernate, Struts, Spring and others frameworks,
• how to integrate everything in an Entreprise Architecture with a Togaf based designer.

Some flash demos are available to see the resulted workbench.

And here are my slides:

Juste un mot pour vous dire que les vidéos du JUG Summer Camp 2010 sont disponibles sur Parleys ici : http://www.parleys.com/#id=31362&st=4

La mienne intitulée "Le MDA en 2010, une visiion pragmatique!" est ici :

Here are my slides I presented at the 2nd Biannual Symposium on Eclipse Open Source
Software & OMG Open Specifications in Minneapolis.

I spoke about our experiences with Acceleo to implement the MOF-to-Text Language specification. At the end of my talk, I explain problems we had about sharing our feedback about specs with the OMG organisation. OMG guys was very interested about this and I hope it will simplify some collaboration beetween Eclipse community and OMG spec writers.

Here is the abstract:
"When OMG tackled the standardization of an M2T syntax with the MOF Model to Text Language specification, commiters decided to rewrite Acceleo from scratch as an official Eclipse Foundation project, changing the syntax to the OMG standard while keeping the exemplary tooling and pragmatism of Acceleo.org.
With Acceleo 3.0 included in Eclipse 3.6, our new goal is to provide the de facto or reference implementation of the standard; however, some parts of the specification are still quite vague and ambiguous and collaboration with OMG isn't smooth. We discuss both the specification and the implementation, and gather overall thoughts on how to provide a long-term and successful communication channel between the Acceleo project and OMG representatives."

Here are the slides:

Don't forget this Thursday if you're closed to Nantes to attend to our Eclipse DemoCamp.

Here we have the program:
18:00 - 18:10: Welcome
18:10 - 18:35: Modisco, by Gabriel Barbier, Mia-Software
18:35 - 19:00: WTP with Glassfish, by Laurent Ruaud and Evariste Konkolé, Serli
19:00 - 19:25: Acceleo, by Stéphane Bégaudeau, Obeo
19:25 - 19:50: Eclipse SOA, by INRIA
19:50 - 20:15: ATL in the AtlanMod Model Management Architecture, by Hugo Bruneliere, EMN/INRIA
20:15 - 20h45: GMF Showcases, by Etienne Juliot, Obeo
20:45 - 21h00: Open discussion

Our goal: few slides, lots of demos!

If you want to attend, please use the wiki page: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_DemoCamps_Helios_2010/Nantes

See you on Thursday!

Since I'm often brought to develop acceleo generators, I often had to design my templates so that they can be easily parameterized by users.
This is important since by doing so, acceleo modules are flexible enough to fit my users needs and (hopefully) I don't have to update modules too often.
Of course, you need to carefully design your templates to achieve this modularity. But for simple needs, simple solutions are the best.
Acceleo natively supports the use of properties files which is an efficient and simple way to parameterize generation module: Properties are generally simple to understand and users can use them easily.
Well, Acceleo 3 is out, and of course properties are still supported. I just wanted to point out something I stumble upon just recently: Properties files are now accessed via the java ResourceBundle mechanism. And consequently, they need to be in the classpath in order to be accessed at runtime.
So, as a module developer, you'll place your default properties files (those you provide with your modules in order to have a sensible default behavior) in a package of your module project.
Well, don't forget to check that this package is exported at runtime, otherwise your properties won't be accessible when you run your generations!


You probably already know how to do it but just in case: open the META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file, and in the Runtime tab just add the package(s) that contain your properties files.
And since you need to do this also for your entry point templates, it may be a good idea to place default properties files in the same package as the entry point template files?

Acceleo 3.0 has just been released and it comes with compatibility with Eclipse 3.4, 3.5 and the latest 3.6 versions. Acceleo 3.0 is a pragmatic implementation of the OMG Model-to-text specification. It supports the developer with most of the features that can be expected from a top quality code generator IDE: simple syntax, efficient code generation, advanced tooling, features on par with the JDT... Acceleo also has a unique tooling around example-based design of code generators with all the pragmatism we had with the 2.x stream.

Acceleo can be downloaded and installed in a number of ways. If you have an existing Eclipse installation and simply wish to install Acceleo in it, installing through the update site is the easiest way. If you'd rather install a new Eclipse with Acceleo, you may want to take a look at the facilities provided by the amalgamation project. Amalgamation is the project that leads the creation of the modeling bundle, it has an easy one click discover and install wizard. Thanks to it you could also easily install also ATL 3.1 (the model-to-model transformation language in Eclipse), EEF (a way to improve the EMF model creation), EMF Compare 1.1 and many other modeling components.

Acceleo 3.1 will be released in June 2011 with the Eclipse Indigo release train. We also planned several corrective versions for the 2.x maintenance stream: a 2.7.1 version will be released this year and a 2.8 version in 2011. Meanwhile, the Acceleo team is investigating towards Eclipse 4 (e4) compatibility. All the links and information to download and install Acceleo are available from here: http://www.eclipse.org/acceleo/download/

Note that examples are available from the menu right-click => New => Examples => Acceleo Plug-ins.

Do not hesitate to give feedback through the mailing-lists, the bug-tracker or the web forum, a Wiki is available to ease the collaboration and the gathering of tips and tricks.
Support information: http://www.eclipse.org/acceleo/support/
Developers information: http://www.eclipse.org/acceleo/developers/

Thanks to all the developers and contributors involved in this release!

Imagine you have a metamodel that reference other metamodels and you want to create a generator for this metamodel. Let's take an example :

The first metamodel contains an EClass named Object that have a reference package of type EPackage. That create a reference to the ECore metamodel.

First we have to create a template for the first metamodel :

%
metamodel http://www.obeo.fr/first

import manymetamodels.ecore
%>

%script type="first.Object" name="default" file="test.txt"%>
Object %name%> :

%package.default%>

Then we need to create the template manymetamodels.ecore.mt :

%
metamodel http://www.eclipse.org/emf/2002/Ecore
%>

%script type="ecore.EPackage" name="default"%>
EPackage %name%>.


And that's all. So you just need to create at least one template per metamodel and then inport them according to the way you navigate your metamodels.

Obeo and INRIA organize an Eclipse DemoCamp at Nantes on the 8th of July: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_DemoCamps_Helios_2010/Nantes

Don't be afraid, we looked at the world cup agenda and there will be no game on this day! So you could attend quietly and maybe take a break about soccer for few hours.

However don't miss the first Eclipse World cup experience where I hope lot of people will join us (Go! Go! Go France!). If you're interested, take a look to the post made by Goulwen.

For the DemoCamp, we have started to work on the agenda and already several interesting demos will be presented: Acceleo by Obeo, MoDisco by Mia-software, WTP by Serli and more to come.

If you want to propose a demo or simply attend, please sign up on the wiki.

See you in Nantes!

Agility is a product based on Eclipse that help migrating code. You can find more details here. This new release comes with several improvements :

- Custom link resolution
- OStore reflective editor
- Export to product parser

There are also bug fixes of course :)

There are several improvements and bug fix :

- Profiling now profile compilation of templates. EObjects profiling can
be also disabled. It's very useful when generating from big models.
- EA models import has been improved
- Some improvements have been done on resource caching
- A template extender have been added. It allows to explicitly extends
template from a module. It relay on extension point.
- It's now possible to add custom services as system services. For those
services the import statement is not required.
- The import order error has been changed into a warning.

For a more complete list you can visite the official Acceleo web site.
To download this new version you can use this update site http://www.acceleo.org/update.

Acceleo 2.7 has just been released. The Acceleo profiler has been improved in particular when generating from big models. A template extender was added; it allows to explicitly extend a template from an Acceleo module. Custom services can now be added as a system services. Several fixes were done on the models import from the Enterprise Architect modeler. Concerning the Acceleo modules, the C and Java modules have been improved. A new build is available on the update site.

Furthermore some bugs have been fixed; you may want to have a look on the new and noteworthy page for the 2.7.0 release: http://www.acceleo.org/pages/new-and-noteworthy-acceleo-2-7-0/

The "Acceleo modeling bundles" providing the Eclipse platform, Acceleo, its prerequisites have been updated. These bundles are the way to go if you want to test the power of modeling within Eclipse: http://www.acceleo.org/pages/download-bundle/ They provide as usual the ATL workbench for model to model transformations, EMF Compare for model comparison and others components composing the official Eclipse Modeling Package.

We planned several corrective versions for the 2.x branch: a 2.7.1 version will be released this year and a 2.8 version in 2011. But as you may know, the next major release of Acceleo is currently implemented and this new version is an official Eclipse foundation project (http://www.eclipse.org/acceleo). The most obvious change of this new version is the overhaul of the syntax as we now follow the OMG standard "MOF Model To Text Language" (MTL) based on OCL. In incubation since a little more than two years within Eclipse, Acceleo 3.0 is coming soon with the Eclipse Helios train (June 2010). Acceleo 3.0 already supports a level of functionality close to its 2.x stream. “Pre-release candidate” milestone could already be tested: http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/m2t/downloads/?project=acceleo

Do not hesitate to give feedback through the mailing-lists, the bug-tracker or the web forum, a Wiki is available to ease the collaboration and the gathering of tips and tricks. http://www.acceleo.org/pages/take-part-in-acceleo/

Thanks to all the developpers and contributors involved in this release!

I just back in my Home Office from a two days trip to Paris.I went to the second birthday of ParisJUG. Thanks and bravo to Antonio and all the ParisJUG team for the organization! It was a special event about the Open-Source revolution.
All French JUG leaders are came specially for this event. Orianne and Jerome Petit, the Poitou-Charentes JUG leaders, announced that we would organize an event in September: The Beach JUG (aka Le JUG de la Plage!) The event will take place in La Rochelle on the French west coast. This will be an opportunity for me to talk about Model Driven. If you are interested to come and talk, ping me, I will redirect.

The evening starting by an excellent Keynote presented by Sacha Labourey. He shares with us his experience as Open-Source committer on JBoss, then CTO and co-GM of the RedHat / JBoss company. And he detailed some best practices for creating an Open-Source and succeed in life (in Open-Source world ;)) I liked this phrase: "We are free and we don't suck ! "
Then there is a surprise, a mystery guest, the buzz turned the whole day on Twitter, tracks from Clara Morgane to Nicolas Sarkozy:

And finally, it's Marc Fleury, the JBoss Founder who became!
I had the honor to discuss with Marc around a glass of French wine! Marc has a really cool life, since it sold JBoss. He came back to Europe, in Madrid and spend full time with his children and used his free time to study Economy... a huge topic to me...
Just after the Keynote, Etienne Juliot presented a quickie before almost 400 people. It explain how Obeo joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Member and how to build a viable Business Model based on the Eclipse ecosystem.

I remember two messages: "Do it!" and "Professional Open-Source is not a Bisounours World", which reaches the Sacha opinion. Indeed, Etienne told us that it is very difficult to monetize open source technologies in order to build a solid software company. He explained how Obeo has managed to build a clear strategy and build a solid business model.

The evening then continued with a third half-time with almost 120 people, the moment to talk with many good Open-Source Guys!

Obeo Agility is a proprietary product edited by Obeo. It's used for code migration. It parses legacy code into a model used for generating code for the targeted technology. We already parse and migrate millions of code lines from many languages (Cobol, Ada, PL1, ...). We finished a project for parsing 5 millions of code lines written in Natural. The goal for this project was not migrating the code, but automating code review. Reports are generated using... Acceleo.

I am now developing on the Eclipse Acceleo project. To get started I bring a feature form the old Acceleo project. I write a profiler for the new Acceleo. It's very similar to the old profiler.

As you can see the screen shot show many statistics about the module execution. By double clicking on an element you can open its definition.

Next week, November 17th, come in Paris to see Eclipse Community and news of Eclipse projects.
I co-organise this event with Cedric Vidal , a very nice guy with lots of cool ideas on model driven and EMF, and we want to promote talks with live demos and few slides (I hate "slideware talks").
We success

Some very nice talks will be propose on Birt, XText, UI (with XWT and Wazaabi) and a "guess star" with an introduction of Mike Milinkovich (Executive Director of the Eclipse Fondation).


Jonathan Musset will talk about the new features of Eclipse Acceleo project. This demo has been shown at Eclipse Summit Europe and was very impressive by the quality of the template editor which is perhaps the best editor of Eclipse platform, just after JDT.




We will also make some demo of Obeo Designer, our Eclipse Modeling distribution with a new exciting tooling to create GMF designers without any Java code (during our demo, we will create from scratch a new nice designer).




Info on the Eclipse wiki page:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_DemoCamps_November_2009/Paris

Register on http://eclipsedemocampparis09.eventbrite.com/
or directly with this form:

The first Eclipse Acceleo workshop will take place on July 10, 2009 in Nantes. More information available here: http://www.acceleo.org/wiki/index.php/EclipseAcceleoDay
The complete program is now available with a lot of interesting talks dealing with Eclipse, MDE, DSM and of course Acceleo ;-)

Hour	Title	Presenter	Affiliation	Language
09:00	Introduction	Etienne Juliot	OBEO	English
09:30	Presentation of a DSM-oriented design and generation environment	Erlé Le Gac	Capgemini	French
10:00	MDA & Acceleo deployment feedbacks	Vincent Fady	Atos Origin	French
10:30	Coffee break
11:00	Acceleo, contribution to the industrialization of developments: Feedback from Bull-Centre de Services Paris	Olivier Leal	Bull	French
11:45	An Open-source Model Driven software development toolset - Lesson learned from Orange Labs	Samuel Liard	Orange Labs	French
12:15	Lunch
14:00	MDSD Scaffolding and Acceleo	Cédric Vidal	Proxiad	English
14:30	Presentation of WISSS (Webapp Is Simple, Stupid and Secure)	François Gaudin	Makina Corpus	English
15:00	Acceleo MTL: a standard alternative for code generation	Cédric Brun	OBEO	English
15:45	Coffee break
16:15	EEF powered by Acceleo MTL - Acceleo MTL ... and punishment!	Goulwen Le Fur	OBEO	English
17:00	Panel

This workshop is free but with mandatory registration (for organisation purposes). Registration details are available here: http://www.acceleo.org/wiki/index.php/EclipseAcceleoDay

Hope to see you there :-)

Eclipse Acceleo Day will take place on July 10, 2009 in Nantes. This workshop is dedicated to Acceleo and associated technologies. All information for attending and participating are available here: Eclipse Acceleo Day.

The workshop fees have been lowed to their minimum: this is a free workshop ;), but mandatory registration (for organisation purposes). This workshop is co-located with the 10th Libre Software Meeting (http://2009.rmll.info/?lang=en).

The workshop will be an occasion for some members of Acceleo community to meet and to exchange ideas. This meeting will also be an opportunity to present some of the planned extensions to this tool and discuss MDE related subjects.

If you want to participate and/or attend, don't hesitate to contact me by email.

Scope

Acceleo (http://www.acceleo.org) is an Eclipse-based toolkit for code generation, with a model based approach. Code generation is the technique of using or writing programs that write source code. Code generators are tools built to serve engineers in the automatic creation of applications. Acceleo is a free software, its development is totally open.

Topics of Interest

• New Eclipse Acceleo project (http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/m2t/?project=acceleo)
• MOF-to-Text Language
• Validation with Acceleo
• Documentation generation
• Scripting generation (PHP, Python, Ruby, ...)
• Link with M2M transformations (ATL and others)
• Comparison with other generative engines
• Integration of Acceleo in a industrial tool chain
• Presentation of existing modules ("ready-to-use" generators)

Talks

Most of the talks will be 20-30 minutes long. Participants are welcome to propose a short talk presenting their project of their experience with Acceleo. Working languages are english and french. All slides and documents will be in english. Demos would be greatly appreciated :-)

Important Dates

• Registration: July 3rd, 2009 (Even if attendance is free, registration is mandatory for organisation purposes)
• Workshop Date : July 10th, 2009

Last month I explained how to tune Acceleo standalone engine threading. But services were still running in mutual exclusion because historically services didn't need to be thread safe. The result was a performance loss.
Services of a given service class couldn't run in parallel by default. It means threads will have to wait for other threads to run services. I noticed that a lot of service classes are thread safe, they don't use field or static references.

But as I can't decide if a service class is thread safe or not for you, I added an interface that bypass the mutual exclusion zone for a given service class. It allows multi threads to run services of a service class. This interface is IThreadSafeService. It declares nothing, so you just have to add the implements clause as following:

public MyServices implements IThreadSafeService {
...
}

But be aware, if you use this interface and your service class is not thread safe it can lead to random boggus behavior. And it can be difficult to find out what is the root cause of your troubles.

One of the main features of the standalone Acceleo engine is to provide multi-thread support. This allows us to divide the code generation time according to the count of available processors, effectively cutting the generation in half on some machines. To share the work between threads, the input model is divided into groups of objects; each group is then queued till a thread can process it.

There are two parameters to tweak the multi-threaded generation. The first one is the number of threads to run simultaneously, the default value being the number of available processors plus one. This allows us to use all available processors, the one supplementary thread used to cover synchronization waiting time. While some threads are waiting for another one, one processor is free to run the thread which was waiting for an idle processor.

The second parameter is the number of objects per group, the default being 20 objects per group. This parameter is very important since its allows you to find the optimum between load sharing and thread management overhead. Your objects groups will not be processed using the same amount of time. So Imaging you divided your model into two groups by setting number of objects in the model divided by 2. The group which runs faster will have to wait for the slower group at the end of the generation. In this case you are losing time. On the oposite you can put a single object per group. This way you minimize the loss of time at the genretation end. But threads will spend more time peeking groups in the queue since there are much more groups.

To set thoses parameters have a look at :
- Extension.setThreadsNumber(int)
- Extension.setEObjectsPerThread(int)

There is a new feature in Acceleo 2.5. This feature allows users to profile the generation process of Acceleo. To activate the profiling you should check the profiling checkbox in the launch configuration of the chain.

The result of the profiling session is saved as a model, it's very useful for performance comparison (using EMF Compare) or report creation in batch environment (using Acceleo :) ).

Basicaly the model is the execution tree of Acceleo, each node being a step of the generation process. Those nodes give statistics like the time spent in the node and its subtree, the percentage of time it represents, and the number of times the element have been run by Acceleo. You can also find the list of EObjects for each node in the outline.

The model can be sorted by chronogical order or by the time spent as shown on the screenshot. It can help in the understanding of the generation process and finding the hotspot(s). Once this hotspot is found you can open the template editor on this element by double clicking it.

I am sure this will help to optimize your Acceleo templates.

This blog will be dedicated to my development works at Obeo. My aim is to provide useful information on products and features I am working on. This information can be technical tricks for developers or general purpose information.

Coming soon, the ability of profiling the text generation process of Acceleo...

Acceleo project has been nominated for the Eclipse Award in the category "Best Open Source Eclipse-Based Developer Tool".
I really think Acceleo can win because it proposes some nice Eclipse tooling, but also because it proves a real community of users and contributors with an open development process.

Last year, it was EclEmma which won.

Papyrus, one of the best OpenSource UML modeleur on the Eclipse platform has been released.

http://www.papyrusuml.org/

Papyrus includes a new killer feature : Java code generation from UML models.

And which generative engine does they choose ? Yeah ! Acceleo.

Obeo has joigned Papyrus community to help them to create this Java generator.
Of course, this generator is under EPL license.

Acceleo 2.0RC2 has been used, with some specific integration plugins like this one (for the Run... menu) :

OMG has defined the MDA term.

But now, what a jungle !
Let's see some very simple definitions.

MDE
- Model Driven Engineering
- definition : all the process of creating softwares with a model driven approach.
- examples : it includes some metamodel based analysis, how to manage teams with MDA,
which steps are required to create a real model based software factory, ...

MDA
- Model Driven Architecture
- definition : the technical choice of tool and metamodel for all the creation of a new software
- examples : transformation models engines, separation and links between PIM/CIM/and others

MDSD
- Model Driven Software Development (also call MDD : Model Driven Development)
- definition : metamodel based tools and process for development step
- examples : source code generation (like Acceleo), PSM model based editor

DSM
- Domain Specific Modeling (and DSL : Domain Specific Language)
- definition : metamodel based modelers to design specific and semantical models
- examples : GMF based modelers, Workflow modelers, Wysiwig model based modelers

ADM
- Architecture Driven Modernization
- definition : modernize existing software with a metamodel approach
- examples : reverse engineering systems, recasting engine (like Agility)

Of course, let's do a metamodel of theses model driven definitions :

ATL v2 will be release very soon.
ATL is a model transformation engine based on MDA standard and Eclipse platform.
It can used for:
- interoperability between tools
- translate a model from a notation to another (for example: relational to uml)
- propose "different zooms" on a model (for example: global specification -> detailled specification -> global design -> ...)
- create any kind of bridge (for example: BPMN -> BPEL or BPMN -> SCA)

ATL 2 is provide some new exciting features:
- better completion on model elements
- virtual machin based on EMF
- better performance
- lots of bug fixes
- a clean updatesite
- integration inside Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4)
- and a new commercial support on http://www.atl-pro.com


See News and Noteworthy for more detail on ATL 2.

For Acceleo v2.0 and launching of Acceleo Modules Farm, Obeo will release with an OpenSource license one of its commercial modules : UML2Hibernate.

I have create this module. It uses UML 2.1 models (class diagram with stereotype > >) and generates :

- DAO layer
- Entity objects
- HBM mapping
- SQL tables (3NF)
- JUnit tests
- Hibernate v3 compatible Design Patterns

It manages lots of associations :
- inheritance
- 1-1
- 1-*
- *-*
- recursive associations
- unidirectionnal and bidirectionnal associations
- ...

It will be available before the end of may. I hope you will enjoy it, and you will contribue to improve its features.
Here is the link where this module will be available : http://www.acceleo.org/pages/modules-repository/

Hi,

I just work on some new icons for Eclipse SCA project.
I need some comments to choose which one need to be removed or changed.

On my point of view, it will be nicer than the v1.0 version because it will better fit Eclipse UI and icons style.

New global palette:

SCA Bindings:

SCA Implementations:

SCA Interfaces:


The new tree Editor:
The graphical Designer isn't ready because it uses old style for embedded icons.
For comment, you can use this bug report.

Eclipse Ganymede has just been released.

Here are list of new features of modeling projects:

• EMF 2.4
• EMF Query, Transaction, Validation 1.2
• Teneo 1.0
• CDO 1.0
• Net4j 1.0
• EMF Compare 0.8
• Ecore Tools 0.8

• GMF 2.1
• MDT 1.1 (OCL, EODM, UML2, XSD)

• ATL 2.0

There are other projects (like Jet, QVT-O, ...) but there haven't a News and Noteworthy page.

After one year of work, Eclipse SCA 1.0 is ready.

This is a new project of Eclipse STP (Soa Tool Platform) for assembly of SOA applications.
To understand the goal of SCA standard (Service Component Architecture, available here), the easiest way is to use an example:
you have one GUI component (for exemple, C# based) named "A" and it need to communicate with one business component "B" write EJB and Java and with another external component "C" written in PHP and only accessible with WebService. With SCA, you just need to declare each component, a reference (required interface) on A (declare with C# interface), and two services on B and C.
The SCA server will automaticly translate protocols and API language to ensure everybody can communicate with everybody.
In a nutshell, SCA isn't a new middleware (it rely on existing middlewares or libraries). It's like Spring, but as a specification and for any protocols and languages.


The main feature of Eclipse SCA project is a nice designer. It's used color and shape very similar of official specification and it's based on GMF. I'm one of the commiters team of this project and the leader is Stephane Drapeau.

It will be bundle inside Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4).
You can test it and read this nice tutorial.

Today i attended to a conference about Alfresco and MDA by BlueXML. What i have discovered is a set of softwares done with Eclipse and Acceleo to generate an Alfresco project (configure the portal, make content types, …). I have been really interested in the fact they have done a new meta model derivated from […]

The second one (Part 2) consists in creating Acceleo services.

This solution provides additionnal functionalities in relation to the first one. Indeed, as the rules are written in Java language, you can decide that a specific rule won't overload a generic one for example...

I've created a "ValidatorServices" class which implements a mechanism to validate a model and get the report from templates, thanks to the services that it provides. The end-user has just to extend this one and to implement the "checkRules" abstract protected method in order to define his own rules.
He can use "validate", "isErrorChecking" or "isWarningChecking" services to validate his model.

But the main new feature consists in giving the possibility to use the result of the validation report and to act on the generation or not. Let's interest by this feature:

The "isErrorChecking" and "isWarningChecking" are able to notify if an error/warning at least has been detected. So, "isErrorChecking" may be used for example to forbid the generation if it returns true.

The "ValidatorServices" class manages a "singleton" behaviour in order to have only one validation launch per generation and to optimize the process.
Moreover, it manages a workaround about Acceleo architecture limitation on the instanciating of custom services between templates...

Indeed, the services don't share the same context between each template. So, let's take an example with two templates where each of them generates a file. We knows that the generation depends on the "file" parameter. Consequently, it's in this place that you have to use "isExistingError" if you want to control the generation. Not to have as many validation launches as templates which generate files, it is required to keep report in memory. To do that, the "ValidatorServices" retrieve data from a temporary file, in the temporary directory of the OS (Java environment variable). You can use a custom action to delete this file (clean data context) at the end of the generation process.
IsXXXChecking use temporary file only if it is called in different templates which generate files.


The main benefit of this way is to be able to cancel the generation if the validation process has thrown errors or warnings... according to your rules.
Then, it provides a flexibility for the use of the validation mechanism (priority of rules, control generation...) thanks to the Java language. So, applying a rule on a "super" meta-class and an other one on a "child" meta-class, you can decide to display the both respective messages if these rules are not checked (and not only the "child" one).

The concern is the technical heaviness of the solution which might be managed, in a more transparent way, by the acceleo core.
Then, the use of Java language involves a loss of the Acceleo features (debugging, traceability...).