Eclipse Modeling Framework Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)If you have used Eclipse to program Java, you might have gotten comfortable with its capabilities. Very intuitive and kindly donated by IBM to open source. So when I opened this book, I anticipated oodles of helpful tweaks and shortcuts.
But not so. IBM has indeed provided these in the book. But their goals were far more ambitious. The Eclipse Modelling Framework is a serious effort to incorporate into a development environment java, XML and UML. They found, perhaps correctly, that most Java programmers, including, and maybe especially the experienced ones, don't really use UML much. Okay, as an afterthought, to document a code base upon a major release. But rarely as a starting point. So one intent is to seamlessly let java programmers incorporate UML. More strongly, they claim that EMF lets you define a model in any of java, XML or UML. Then simply clicking a button will make EMF generate the other 2 forms. The greatest payoff for this is that it lets programmers, who may not be fluent in UML, make a graphical UML model and thence have EMF make the java code stubs. Much less error prone than doing it manually.
There is an analogy here with Spice, if any of you have an electrical engineering background. Until the late 80s, if you wanted to model a circuit in Spice, you typically drew it by hand on paper. Then you manually transcribed these into a text file of netlists that was input into Spice. Slow and very error prone. Then along came MicroSim, Carver Mead's Magic program and others, that let you construct a circuit diagram on a console, and from which you could press a button and a Spice input file would be made. Much more productive.
The book offers a similar gain in productivity. All you are asked to risk is your time in understanding the book.

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EMF is a powerful framework and code generation facility for building Java applications based on simple model definitions. Designed to make modeling practical and useful to the mainstream Java programmer, EMF unifies three important technologies: Java, XML, and UML. Models can either be defined using a UML modeling tool, an XML Schema, or by specifying simple annotations on Java interfaces whereby programmers write the abstract interfaces (a small subset of what they would normally need to write), and the rest is generated automatically and merged back into their existing code. This book thoroughly describes EMF and shows how EMF-based modeling is a foundation for fine-grained interoperability and data sharing among tools and applications. The authors provide a basic overview of the most important concepts in EMF and modeling as well as clear explanations with step-by-step instructions for defining EMF models. This book shows how the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) has successfully bridged the gap between modelers and Java programmers.It serves as a gentle introduction to modeling for Java programmers and at the same time as a reinforcement of the modeler's theory that plenty of Java coding can be automated, given an appropriate tool.

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