Tigerstripe Sub-Project Proposal
Introduction
Note:The name of the project may change at or prior to the Creation Review due to trademark issues.
The Tigerstripe project is a proposed open source project under the Eclipse Technology Project.
This proposal is in the project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process document) and is written to declare its intent and scope. This proposal is written to solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. You are invited to comment and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the eclipse.technology.tigerstripe newsgroup. The project will follow the structure and guidelines as outlined by the Technology PMC.
Background
Model-Driven Development (MDD) is an approach in software and systems development to create application code, application programming interfaces (API) and specification based on Models. These models are processed through a series of transformations to generate the final application, code or systems to be deployed.
Using MDD has multiple benefits over traditional software and systems development, in that it leads to better code quality, better maintainability and has the potential to improve the overall efficiency of a development organization significantly.
However "mastering" of MDD can only be achieved with the appropriate tooling support, from modeling support, to code generation, but also for automated testing, continuous integration, etc. While the industry at large provides all of these parts, having a single environment to cover the process from A to Z is key to harvesting the benefits of MDD. Moreover, generic-purpose UML modeling tools offer too much flexibility to non-experienced UML modelers. When working with large distributed teams, it becomes clear that the modeling tool needs to guide and constrain the users according to the target domain. This typically goes beyond UML profiles and require tight naming conventions and validation rules accross a model to ensure the quality of the generated code or specification, in particular in the Telecommunications Industry.
Tigerstripe was born two years ago to address this need of a single, integrated environment dedicated to MDD in the Telecommunications Industry: in particular, Tigerstripe was first adopted by Telecommunications standard bodies for Operational and Business Support Systems management interfaces. The product is built using the standard Eclipse Modeling Components (namely EMF/GMF) and provides an extensible MDD framework within Eclipse. In the last two years, the Tigerstripe user-community has been well established within the Telecom Industry, where in particular, Standard Bodies such as the TeleManagement Forum has been delivering standard specification and APIs for Operational and Business Support Systems integration (OSS/BSS) with Tigerstripe.
Scope
The objectives of the Tigerstripe sub-project are:
- contribute an extensible toolset for Model-Driven Development targeting the Telecommunications Vertical, with extension points supporting the generation of application code, APIs, specifications or documentation. The initial version was built using a combination of existing Eclipse components and proprietary technology to address the specific needs of this industry.
- integrate additional components of Eclipse projects into the existing environment to enhance the existing MDD environment or replace proprietary technologies as appropriate
- provide an extensible framework, and solicit contributions so that industry specific models can be developed, maintained and exchanged. Tigerstripe's initial user community is expected to be in the Telecoms industry
- provide additional tools, samples and ideas that allows integration of Tigerstripe with other existing environments.
Description
Tigerstripe in its current state is commercial grade Eclipse feature that provides:
- A subset of UML2 features with Class Diagrams and Instance Diagrams
- Model scoping capabilities aimed at support for large models and multiple generation paths
- Strong, flexible generation engine allowing users to develop "Tigerstripe Plugins" to plug-in the necessary code and templates needed for code/specs/documentation generation.
- Headless model-driven generation, to enable integration with continuous build environments.
It shall be noted that while the existing initial user-community (see below) is mainly coming from the Telecom Industry, the platform is true agnostic as what is modeled and what is generated from it. We believe Tigerstripe has the potential to foster an eco-system for MDD across industries.
Organization
Mentors
- Doug Schaefer, QNX
- Harm Sluiman, IBM
Initial Committers
Initial committers will be issued of the existing developers' pool. They will initially focus on the transition from a commercial product to an open-source, community-based platform. They will work with the existing user-community to encourage contributions to the platform. The initial committers are from Cisco Systems:
- Eric Dillon (project lead)
- Duncan Keysell
- Richard Craddock
- Jim Strawn
- Steve Jerman
Interested Parties
The following parties have expressed interest in this project:
- Harris Stratex - Zhdankin, Alex [azhdanki@harris.com]
- Telcordia - Francesco Caruso [caruso@telcordia.com]
- Progress Software - John Petrie [petrie@progress.com]
- Vodafone D2 - Joerg Frankenberger [joerg.frankenberger@vodafone.com]
- Nokia Siemens Networks - Stefan Vaillant [stefan.vaillant@nsn.com]
- Amdocs - Richard Mishra [richard.mishra@amdocs.com]
- Frox - Roman Schlegel [roman.schlegel@frox.com]
Initial User Community
The initial user community will consist of Cisco Systems and multiple technical teams of the TeleManagement Forum that have been actively using Tigerstripe for standards making process over the last two years.
A series of Tutorials, samples together with the corresponding documentation is already available about Tigerstripe. This will be made available through a Tigerstripe wiki for example in an effort to further bootstrap the growth of the existing user-community.