GMF

Graphical Modeling is widely being used for visualization of complex systems. By encapsulating the complexities of the underlying System in form of visual representations that provide an ease of use, Graphical Modeling is gaining its importance in Automotive Software Development. However each framework has its own features and constraints. Every graphical framework introduces a tight coupling of domain with its representation. XGraF was built to reduce this coupling with the help of DSL.

In today’s Autosar world, ARText is the Domain Specific Languages (DSL) for defining the Autosar software. In this instance XGraF defines a DSL to bind the domain (for e.g., ARText) to a graphical representation. The challenge here was to define a DSL which would address all the graphical components (Shapes, connection, layouts, etc..,)
Defining DSL is just one side of the coin, the next step was to build a generator that can generate code in various graphical frameworks (for e.g., GMF, Graphiti, etc..,).

Some advantages:
-Quick and Easy realisation of domain in preferred graphical framework
-reduces the development effort by plugging the generated code into existing and/or new tools

We would like to talk about a project that would help to build a common framework for designing Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) diagrams.

Both, graphical as well as textual modeling, indisputably have their respective advantages (and disadvantages). And while a few evangelists might praise the superiority of one formalism over the other, the combination of both into a single integrated modeling tool seems to be the holy grail most modelers are indeed searching for.

While with the GMF runtime, a mature framework to develop graphical modeling tools has already been around for quite a while (which is now complemented by Graphiti), Xtext has recently closed the gap with respect to textual modeling. As such, the longed for undertaking has in theory - at least to some extent - become feasible.

Within this talk I will sketch how the integration of fully featured Xtext cell editors with support for syntax highlighting, auto-completion, scoping, and validation into a GMF-based graphical editor (and its related property sheets) can be technically achieved.