Model and Execute!

The focus of the talks that I attended today at EclipseCon, was about modeling and execution. The first talk (after the really great keynote that others on PlanetEclipse already posted about) was about a model-driven build management suite called Storm that is currently developed by Brane. If you ever had the problem, that you want to build your Eclipse distribution customized yourself, then this software might be interesting for you.

The second talk, "Executing BPMN" described the differences between graphical process modeling languages like BPMN and executing languages such as jPDL. Koen Aers, the presenter of this talk, also explained why an overall coverage of BPMN will not be possible in their tool (and is not even necessary as research found out). But he gave a quick preview on the coming modeler that will be distributed in the jBPM release in July and it already looked really nice (alas it is not yet build upon JWT!).

The next track was a set of SOA talks from the STP project: how the policy editor is evolving, what is currently happening around the Enterprise Integration Designer, how one can model SCA composites and how the STP-IM all connects these components has been summarized in short time quite well. Probably the tuturial on Monday has given much more insight, but having four hours is of course much more than only one.

Another track of this day was about an EMF repository, workflow and model execution. Actually, it have been three different talks: the first one was about EMFStore, a project some colleagues from the TU Munich presented and which was integrated in their tool suite Unicase. Alas, I didn't find the time to talk to them, but they said that they will have a poster at the poster session tomorrow, so I'm already looking forward to that. The second presenter was Bryan Hunt who gave a quick introduction into the MWE project and how the classes he has designed work together. The third one in this track was from the HU Berlin (so a lot of German Ph.D. students here!) and presented a framework for the execution of models. He demonstrated it on a C# interpreter where the dynamic behavior was actually modeled with his toolset(building on OCL and UML State diagrams). It reminded me a little bit at Executable UML (xUML), but I didn't have the time to look further into the differences between both.

In the end I got a good impression how the next major release, Galileo, is currently build using model-driven development tools: model-to-model transformations (QVTO) and model-to-text-transformations (XPand) are used in order to assemble and build all the milestone builds for Galileo. So, it seems to me that more and more areas are open to modeling and I'm already looking forward to the talks on this topic tomorrow.