EMFCompare improvements: fulfilling requirements of the Modeling Platform Working Group

One year ago, the Modeling Platform Working Group started to create an integrated modeling development platform and toolchain based on Eclipse technology. A number of companies are participating in developing a list of requirements and vision for the Modeling Platform.

Among others, some identified requirements were:
- analyzing and reconciliation of differences between different versions of model artifacts,
- identification of conflicting changes,
- capability to compare/merge entire model resources or individual model elements and fragments and
- comparison and merge of graphical model representations (concrete syntax).

EMF Compare fulfilled already several of those requirements. It provides comparison and merge facility for any kind of EMF Model. It includes a generic comparison engine, the ability to export differences in a model patch and it is integrated with the Eclipse Team API meaning that it enable collaborative work on models using CVS, SVN and GIT.

The MPWG has motivated partners to sponsor the development of lacking features on modeling projects. EMFCompare is one of the component that has benefited from such a sponsoring. And it has been improved a lot this year. Aside from some UIs enhancement, performance and reliability improvments, it now hosts a dedicated UML comparison engine. We support GMF diagram comparison engine with a dedicated support for Papyrus UML model editor. Finally it now implements the logical model integration support forbidding partial commit, update or merge that would break a model splitted into several fragments.

As showcase, we will compare several versions of some well known Ecore models and some Papyrus/UML diagrams. In addition to the demo part, we will introduce all of those novelties and how they fulfilled requirements from the MPWG.

Slides are available on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/mikaelbarbero/eclipseconeurope-2011-emfcompare...