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Westboro
Ottawa, ON
Canada

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.

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Blog

An ad hoc record of Christian W. Damus's professional and personal activity.

Filtering by Tag: OCL

Fun with OCL in Papyrus Mars

Christian W. Damus

 

Last week I presented an "Introduction to OCL" lunch-and-learn talk to a private client.  We had some technical troubles with the remote screen-sharing system, so the live demo portion of the presentation didn't exactly turn out as we had hoped.  Consequently, to finish the job and to ensure that my work of preparing demo materials wouldn't go to waste, I decided to record screencasts instead and share them with everybody.

These screencasts are up to my usual production standard (which is to say unevenly paced and hardly edited) because I never really have time to spend on these things.  But, I hope they may serve as a useful introduction to the value of OCL in the Eclipse modeling universe, as well as OCL-related transformation languages that I included in my OCL introduction talk.

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tags Mars, OCL, Modeling, Papyrus, UML, Eclipse

OCL: Who Cares?

Christian W. Damus

This week, the OCL 2.1 RTF has had to re-launch the voting on its first ballot, because it failed to reach a quorum.  With a 10-member voting list, 2 votes just didn't cut it.  And these were the two companies that put some effort into resurrecting this specification by addressing a substantial number of issues.

It's disappointing to see that there is so little interest from the OMG membership in the health of this specification that should, and I think was intended to be, a cornerstone of the the MOF architecture.  There is still interest in the user community, judging by the continued influx of issue reports.

No metamodel is complete without constraints that specify the well-formedness of instance models.  And OCL could be a key tool in that department, if it can keep up with the evolution of MOF and UML.  Indeed, it already seems to be an important part of several Eclipse modeling technologies, as I hope to demonstrate at EclipseCon 2009.  However, the current state of the specification makes the implementation of conformant tools difficult and interchange of OCL models impossible, because the language is imprecisely and inconsistently specified (some bits aren't really specified at all).

A few of us are working hard to reinvigorate and reform this specification, but we need help.  With just two OMG members involved at this point, it is difficult even to get through a vote, and I worry about how relevant the product will be that results from such a small collaboration.  So, pitch in with your time (it doesn't take much) and elbow-grease to make OCL succeed!  Let's not let this thing go the way of the dodo.

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tags Eclipse, OCL, UML, OMG