M2M News

ATL web site moved from GMT to M2M posted 15‑01‑2007

ATL web site moved from GMT to M2M. It is now accessible here: http://www.eclipse.org/m2m/atl/.

As a consequence, the old ATL mailing list migrated to the Eclipse M2M newsgroup. For information about accessing Eclipse newsgroups, see: http://www.eclipse.org/newsgroups/. Last point, for the Eclipse M2M posting. Since we are going to share this newsgroup with the other M2M components, the PMC has asked us to prefix all posts (questions, answers, comments), with the component name. You will need to add [ATL] at the beginning of the subject of your post o that they may be distinguished from the posts related to the other components.
ATL recognized as a standard solution for model transformation in Eclipse posted 15‑01‑2007

The ATL transformation language defined by INRIA has been recognized as a standard component in Eclipse. ATL is now integrated into the new M2M (Model-to-Model, http://www.eclipse.org/m2m/) project. This project belongs to the Eclipse modeling activities branch (Eclipse Modeling, http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/).

Together with the Borland and Compuware solutions, ATL will now be part of the set of Eclipse recommended tools for performing model-to-model transformations. ATL allows to implement some simple UML-to-Java conversions but also much more complex transformations, for instance in the context of heterogeneous data or modernization of legacy systems.

The integration of ATL into this new M2M project is an important recognition. ATL will be used in the same way as other Eclipse standard solutions such as EMF, Ecore or GMF. Moreover, the support of the Eclipse foundation developers' community will ensure to ATL an important additional help for development and will also offer good stability in time to language users. Some companies did not wait this for integrating ATL into their own toolset or even into their commercial offers (ATL is released under the EPL license).

ATL is being used in the ModelPlex European project. It is also an official selected solution in the "Usine Logicielle" project of the "System@tic" Paris cluster (http://www.systematic-paris-region.org/) or in the French OpenEmbeDD project. More than one hundred industrial and academic sites are using ATL in many countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, USA, Canada, Brazil, etc). In France the TopCased project of the Aerospace valley cluster (http://www.topcased.org/) also uses the ATL solution. Many university centers, such as the "Ecole Centrale de Lille", are using ATL as a basis for teaching MDA approaches.

In 2004 the ATL initiative already won an award for the "IBM Eclipse Innovation Grants". Since this date, the language has evolved in three successive versions, with now an advanced development environment, a stable virtual machine, a significant transformations' library and an important users and contributors community. The language has been designed and developed at INRIA Nantes by Frederic Jouault who is now the Eclipse M2M project leader. One of his main tasks will be to synchronize the efforts on the future ATL developments with the Compuware and Borland components, which are more aligned on the QVT recommendation for model transformation as defined by the OMG.

The recognition of the ATL language into the Eclipse modeling project is a very significant example of the current success of open-source approaches. In four years, an innovative product, coming from basic research and supported by various initiatives such as the ModelWare Integrated European project has evolved from the status of laboratory prototype to the level of stable industrial solution.
M2M is alive posted 15‑01‑2007

The M2M project started with an initial version of the M2M web site.

The M2M project will deliver a framework for model-to-model transformation languages. More details will be available soon.