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I am an independent software development consultant, specializing in model-driven development with Eclipse technology, which has been a passion for the last ten years. I am widely recognized for my high-quality output, timely delivery, and friendly and engaging manner.
I also happen to be a capable singer, performing sacred and secular works for choir and tenor solo from the renaissance to today. If you are presenting vocal music in Ottawa, eastern Ontario, or west Québec, I can be your tenor.
An ad hoc record of Christian W. Damus's professional and personal activity.
This past winter I was stuck in the basement for close to three months while a kitchen and bath renovation on the main floor took over not only those spaces but also my office. These conditions prompted an idea — and a journey — that sucked me in deeper than I had ever intended, but which in the end gave me a stunning kitchen feature for the ages.
Read MoreAs not all models that EMF Compare operates on will be described in terms of a façade, it is equally to be expected that some models will only partially comprise domain-specific content that can be described by a façade. So, models will often present a mix of content in various languages, some of which have façades and some which don't: imagine a UML design model that mixes "pure UML" content that describes the structure and behaviour of a system in very abstract terms, linked to refinements of various components in their own DSLs.
The video above demonstrates the first step towards support for mixed-mode comparison and merge, in which a model merge is performed in UML terms for abstract design content and a domain-specific façade for more lower-level design content pertaining to a particular technology. As before, check out the prototype on GitHub.
Updated 10.25, 27 July 2017
In the first demonstration video, a problem cropped up in which pseudo-conflicts were detected on erroneous matching of new elements added on the left and the right sides. The consequence was that a correct and complete merge would not be possible. The brief update video, above, shows how this problem can be resolved in the façade model simply by providing unique identifiers for every object to help the matching process.
Yes, it has been a while since I last blogged, and that was before a long run of work on the Papyrus-RT project which just this month reached the all-important 1.0 release. Now I have changed tack slightly, still working on Eclipse open-source projects, but with a focus on the EMF Compare. At least, for now.
I am diving head-first into this project with some prototyping/experimentation in the use of Façade Models for customization and stream-lining of the user experience of compare/merge in complex modeling languages such as UML, especially when profiled for DSMLs (domain-specific modeling languages).
The embedded video is a demonstration, longer than is usual for these videos of mine, of the first prototype of pluggable Façade Providers in the EMF Compare framework. The framework consults the available façade providers to obtain instances of a façade model representing the input models to be compared. The idea is that the façade can more concisely and, in some ways, usefully encode the semantics of the domain-specific language that are significant to the efficient and correct comparison and merging of those models. Indeed, even the very simple example presented in the video shows how domain-specific constraints are easily represented in the façade that enable detection of merge conflicts that are much more cumbersome to implement "by hand" in the EMF Compare framework.
Basically, what happens is that instead of comparing the underlying model content (in this case, profiled UML), the system compares the façades and presents that comparison to the user in its terms. And changes performed by the user on the merge result are propagated by the façade to the underlying model, to be written out when the user saves the merge result.
Check out the video above and get the code in my GitHub fork of the EMF Compare project, on the uml-compare branch. Look particularly at the new plug-in and test projects:
oeec.facade — some core façade framework bitsoeec.facade.ui — the user interface for façade provider preferencesoeec.uml2.facade — extensions to support façades for UML profilesoeec.uml2.facade.tests — some JUnit tests for basic façade mechanics and simple façade-based compare/merge scenariosWhere, of course, oeec is just a compact substitute for the org.eclipse.emf.compare namespace.