Friday, October 17, 2008

On Beginnings and Ends...

So far, it seems that Microsoft's participation at the OMG is more like the end of the beginning than the beginning of the end. Pariticipants in the UML Roadmap working group met on Tuesday to discuss everybody's top three problems/concerns with UML, and there seems to be a concensus that most of the issues fall under a general theme of separation of concerns. More homework has been issued for the next call (to take place in two weeks); this time, the  assignment is to provide feedback on a proposal to develop an integration architecture that would support a family of related languages (wasn't that what MDA was supposed to be?) and to make alternative proposals for addressing the "Separation of Concerns" problem in UML. Any ideas?

Speaking of beginnings and ends, there have been some bitter-sweet changes in the MDT project recently. Termination reviews for the EODM and OCL Tools components were "successful" as of last Wednesday (since nobody from the community requested a formal review), and so both have been archived. The OCL Tools component was actually never completely provisioned, so all that remains of it is a page in Eclipsepedia. EODM, on the other hand, was a more or less functional component for several years, but unfortunately it no longer had a community of developers to maintain it (despite a small but interested user community). The Eclipsepedia page for EODM also remains, and its newsgroup and mailing list have been archived, as have its downloads. Luckily, a proposal for a new ODM implementation at Eclipse is in the works; stay tuned for details.

On a positive note, there have been a couple of new beginnings in MDT. The Papyrus component has now been successfully created, and provisioning is nearly complete. The initial project team (one of the largest and most diverse that I've seen at Eclipse) has plans to provide a code contribution sometime in November; for more details, see the newsgroup or mailing list. Also, the proposal for a new Metamodel Specification Tools (MST) subproject in MDT has finally been declared. If you're interested, please join in the newgroup discussion or drop me a line!

2 comments:

Tom Morris said...

Is there a document number for the proposal you mention? That might help focus feedback.

Kenn Hussey said...

The proposal was circulated on the mailing list that's been set up for the working group (uml_roadmap@omg.org); I don't think it's been assigned an official OMG document number (although it probably should/could). The input I was looking for here was ideas on how to resolve the 'separation of concerns' issue(s) with UML...