MDT/MST-Proposal

Introduction

Metamodel Specification Tools (MST) is a proposed open source subproject of the Model Development Tools (MDT) project to provide tooling for the development of MOF compliant metamodels, and specifications based on them.

This project is in the Pre-Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and this document is written to declare its intent and scope. This proposal is written to solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. You are invited to comment on and/or join in the development of the project. Please send all feedback to the eclipse.modeling.mdt newsgroup.

Background

The importance of supporting industry standards is critical to the success of the Modeling project, and to Eclipse in general. The role of the Modeling project in the support of industry standards is to enable their creation and maintenance within the Eclipse community. Furthermore, as standards bodies such as the OMG have a strong modeling focus, the Modeling project needs to facilitate communication and outreach through its PMC and project contributors to foster a good working relationship with external organizations.

One of the challenges of developing an OMG specification is the lack of tooling support for CMOF (Complete Meta Object Facility) models. This was one of the many topics that were discussed during the “Mega Modeling Mania” BoF at EclipseCon 2008 and again at the Eclipse/OMG Symposia in March and June. Based on those discussions, there appears to be demand for tooling that will make it easy to create, serialize (in CMOF-compliant XMI), and document metamodels that form the basis for open specifications. This a proposal for a new sub-project of the MDT project, dubbed “Metamodel Specification Tools”, or MST, to provide this kind of tooling at Eclipse.

Scope

The MST project would customize and/or extend the existing (or forthcoming) UML editors (primarily for class and package/profile diagrams) to expose CMOF concepts which are missing in UML (like identifiers, namespace URIs, and XMI tags), leverage the CMOF (de)serialization support that was introduced in the UML2 project as part of the Ganymede release, and provide a mechanism for generating a specification (or at least a decent boiler plate for one) directly from the metamodel using BIRT. It might also be desirable for the component to automate the mapping between a metamodel and its profile representation (if there is one) and possibly to make use of the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) to document and coordinate the specification development process.

Relationship with Other Eclipse Projects/Components

The Papyrus (recently created), UML2 Tools, and UML2 subprojects of the Model Developement Tools (MDT) project already (or will soon) provide much of the functionality that will be used to create and serialize MOF-compliant metamodels. It is our intent to work closely with these project teams to ensure that the challenges discovered while developing this new project can be addressed.

Obvious integrations with other Modeling subprojects will be explored as the project evolves.

Organization

Initial Committers

The initial committers for this component would be:

• Kenn Hussey (Embarcadero Technologies), proposed project lead

• Nicolas Rouquette (JPL)

• Nick Dowler (Adaptive)

• TBD

Code Contributions

This project will not include an initial code contribution. Extensions to existing frameworks and tooling consisting of Java packages within the org.eclipse.mst.* namespace will be developed as required to provide the capabilities mentioned above.

Interested Parties

Thus far, interest in this project has been expressed by Embarcadero Technologies, IBM, JPL, Adaptive, No Magic, Inc., visumpoint, Armstrong Process Group, Inc., and Unisys.

Developer Community

The team of initial committers will explore statements of interest from additional developers experienced with metamodel and/or specification development or willing to gain such experience.

User Community

It is expected that the user community for this project will consist primarily of specification authors, given that it is essentially a tool aimed at building and documentation metamodels.

Tentative Plan

The first release of this project, focused on the metamodel creation and serialization, would be tentatively scheduled for June 2009, as part of the Galileo simultaneous release.