Viewpoints-enabled Modeling Tools

This post follows those showing how it's possible to leverage EMF and JBoss Drools to get an interactive model getting updated considering business rules, and how you can get a set of graphical modelers to ease your design tasks and provide feedback while you're building your system.

Now let's focus on providing "the right feedback at the right time". When you're designing a system, you're trying to reach the following goal : building it nicely and making sure it fits your requirements and contraints. You're always balancing between different concerns, your system simplicity, agility, performances, safety ...

Having a good tooling for that is more than important, and the tooling failed since now : it's always providing many more information or possible actions than what you actually need and not what's your focus right now.

Here comes the viewpoints (IEEE) , viewpoints enabled tooling is able to extends, hide, or provide new representations and actions depending on what you want to consider. As building a system is always a trade-off between multiples criteria, you don't want to be overwhelmed with all the constraints feedback, you just want to see relevant information and be able to do relevant actions. The concept is quite similar to the Eclipse perspectives.

The first demo (a few minutes) provides an overview of the tooling specification model we started in the last post. It's been completed with a few more representations, validation rules, and, more important, re-organized in term of viewpoints.


The following demo (6 minutes) shows the usage of such a tooling, using (again) the simple "Flow" example.



Eclipse is great as a platform and enables you to build great tooling to that your users stay focused on their business issues (which are complex enough already) . That's what we are trying to achieve with this product.

Moreover, Eclipse Modeling is a gem mine driven by enthusiastic people, don't wait and come with us, resistance is futile ;)