Modeling

Embedded systems and software developers juggle three critical challenges: rising design complexity, increasingly narrow time-to-market windows, and doing more with existing resources. To overcome these difficult issues, many development teams use the Eclipse open source platform for software development. One advantage of the Eclipse workspace is that it provides a highly customizable environment that can be tailored to the needs of individual software developers.

Today, DZone releases the Eclipse Modelling Framework Refcard, with all you need to get started using EMF, the most popular framework among Eclipse users and projects. Ed Merks was the primary author of this Refcard, with me co-authoring as a user of EMF. Here, Ed answers some questions about the Refcard and EMF.

As a user of EMF, I know how much this book has been anticipated, and it hasn't failed to deliver. This book will appeal to both long time users of EMF and developers who want to get started with the technology. Anyone interested in model driven development within Eclipse will learn a lot from this edition. So much in the Eclipse community is based on EMF that it is essential to understand it's architecture and capabilities.

The first in the Programming Heroes category of our DZone Conversations sees us talking with Ed Merks, of EMF and Eclipse fame. The Programming Heroes series gives me the chance to talk to some of the people that I think have lead the trends in software development. The work that Ed has put behind the modelling projects at Eclipse has been tremendous. Ed had been working with IBM for a long time, and earlier this year left to do his own thing. We find out more about the projects he's interested in, as well as how Ed got into programming, and his advice for new software developers.