Acceleo

Introduction

The Acceleo Project (previously named MTL) is an open source component under the Eclipse Modelling / Model To Text (M2T) project [1]. Its primary goal is to provide an implementation of the MOF Model To Text OMG standard [2].

You do not need to be an expert to start using the plug-ins: using the provided example projects and the powerful completion feature of the Acceleo editor, it is very easy to get started once you understand the basic principles.

Concerning the language, almost all of the OMG specification keywords are supported (those marked with an asterisk are not fully supported yet):

module, import, extends, template, query, public, private, protected, guard, init,
overrides, each, before, after, for, if, elseif, else, let, elselet, trace*, macro*,
file, mode, text_explicit*, code_explicit*, super, stdout

For all the details about these keywords and the MOF Model to Text Language in general, you can consult the official MTL Specification available at the OMG website.

Compatibility

The Acceleo development team does its best to maintain downward compatibility towards Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4). Following is the compatibility chart :

Accelo	Eclipse 3.4 - EMF 2.4	Eclipse 3.5 - EMF 2.5
0.8	OK	OK

An empty cell indicates that the compatibility hasn't been tested for a particular combination.

Take note that some features are enabled in Galileo (Eclipse 3.5) that are not accessible on Ganymede and that Acceleo templates written within Galileo might not compile within Ganymede! This is mostly the case because of useless "oclAsType" calls in Galileo that were mandatory in Ganymede.

Features

The Acceleo template editor is associated with Acceleo source files (.mtl files) and provides all the features of a modern programming editor to make you more productive when developing code generation modules:

• Syntax highlighting

• Smart completion

• Navigation to definitions and references

• Error highlighting

• Dynamic outline

• Code folding

Some of these features are described in details in the Acceleo documentation plugin.

New & Noteworthy

Check the New And Noteworthy page for information on notable evolutions for each version.

Presentations

Acceleo at Eclipse Con 2009 : a Real Standard Alternative for Code Generation

From Acceleo.org to Eclipse.org

Acceleo.org was created 4 years ago, and as the time goes, the Team has been more and more convinced that the MOF Model To Text OMG specification was the way to go for the project. We started to code a reference implementation for the standard within the Eclipse M2T project. We have managed to provide nice tooling, simple syntax and efficient code generation with all the pragmatism we had about Acceleo.org. There aren't a lot of differences between the old version of acceleo and the new one.

We are confident that the Acceleo community gain value from moving to a self hosted project to an Eclipse one, and that end users will follow the transfert from Acceleo.org to Eclipse.org as we will provide the same level of functionnalities and we will insure an interoperability between the old syntax and the new syntax (the standard one).

The Acceleo Team will continue to maintain the old syntax of Acceleo outside of eclipse (www.acceleo.org ) during some few years, but the new versions and the new features will take place on Eclipse.org. In the next release you'll have an automated tooling helping you to migrate your templates from a syntax to another.

For Acceleo lover, you will find in Eclipse Acceleo everything you have loved in the Acceleo.org version and more (the standard compliance with more documentation). This specification is really a good one : http://www.omg.org/spec/MOFM2T/1.0/

At the moment, those who need a perfect stability must continue to use the Acceleo.org version (2.x). As time goes on, Eclipse Acceleo is better and better and you can already have a try right now (0.8). That said, we still need some few month to get the same stability level between our current stable version and the new one. The next generation Acceleo will be ready for the next Eclipse simultaneous release (Helios).

References

• [1] Eclipse Model To Text (M2T) project
• [2] OMG MOF Models to Text Transformation Language Final Adopted Specification