Connected Again

After a few years away, I am (finally) re-connecting with a community that I had been following still but not really participating in.  As of today, I am once again an Eclipse committer.

I have been honoured with election to the EMF CDO (Connected Data Objects) project committer team and Eclipse Foundation's provisioning of my account is complete.  Thanks to Eike and the whole team for inviting me into the fold!

CDO is a very exciting technology for real-time sharing of EMF-based models on a large scale.  The team has done an amazing amount of high-quality work over the last several years, and the community of users is large and very active.  Development continues apace adding great new features every year.

I have contributed some enhancements to CDO to make UML models shareable using CDO's "legacy mode" in next year's 4.2 release (in the Kepler line-up).  In part, these require some tweaks in the Eclipse UML2 implementation that are currently in the pipeline, but the end result should be that by the end of this calendar year, UML in all its glory, including dynamic profile definitions and stereotype applications, can be shared in CDO repositories.  I hope to follow this up with continual enhancements and bug fixes in the legacy mode, as well as working on the Dawn component to support GMF-based UML diagram editors.

I look forward to working with the CDO team and its great user community!

The Doctor Is In

Say "Hello" to MDHT 1.1

The Model-Driven Health Tools project at openhealthtools.org has announced its much-anticipated 1.1 release.  I'm very glad to have been able to contribute in various small ways to this release.  I'm thrilled with all the very good work that the whole team has put into this; it's a significant step up in usability and function.

This release provides an implementation of the Consolidated CDA model (C-CDA) which, together with richer modeling constructs, makes it easier to define constraints on CDA-based XML documents using:

• improved coordination of property validation and terminology constraints with automatic conformance rule text

• nested inner classes for constraints on nested elements.  Inner classes are not templates but specialize template definitions to add constraints in the containing context. Less OCL to write!

• improved drag-and-drop and copy/paste workflows in the editor

• bug fixes and and more!

I've even heard a rumour that MDHT has been coerced to generating Implementation Guides in ePub format for reading in iBooks on your iPad!

If you are an IT practitioner or software developer in the health industry, or even if you're just interested in constraint-based modeling and tool development using UML and other Eclipse Modeling technologies such as EMF and OCL, I definitely recommend checking out the New and Noteworthy page and other documentation for this release.  And, of course, download the all-in-one workbench release and take it for a spin!

Congratulations to the whole MDHT team for a high-quality release!

Teen-age iPad

Sometimes when I'm typing on my iPad, I hit the "M" key instead of the space bar.  Not a big deal, because usually the autocorrect fixes it for me, understanding that I wanted a space.

But, today, while writing an e-mail, I found myself staring at the word "woulda" just behind the cursor (yes, Mr. Vogt, behind).  I certainly woulda neva typed that for myself!

Thanks, iPad, for trying to sling some slang into my work.