Friday, February 22, 2008

Converging Model Editors

Yesterday, Sven implemented an EMF Resource that serializes its content in Xtext format. We combined it with a graphical editor and the new EValidator adapter for oAW check. Generating everything, we finally got three synchronized editors all showing different representations of the same resource: Graphical, in Xtext and in an Ecore tree. Even complex changes in one editor were automatically transferred to all other editors on save and two of the editors even used the same checks for validation. 

That really rocked.

And it shows how great EMF and oAW really are. In the future, it should be easy to write DSLs with mixed representations, e.g. a graphical part for the element connections and a textual part for the details.

I am really looking forward to work on a closer integration of  oAW and EMF. There's so much potential. 

1 comment:

citylights said...

Jan,

Very promising work. I will follow your progress with interest. I suspect this work will lead to some very interesting insights into language design generally. I have always considered languages [graphical or textual] as expressive mediums having a given conceptual capacity for defining particular types of models.