As
per the Eclipse Development Process, we are notifying the Eclipse
Membership-at-Large of the intent of Borland
to propose the Graphical Modeling Framework Project as part of the Technology PMC.
A brief
description of the project is below. A project proposal will be posted
on www.eclipse.org early next
week.
The
Eclipse Modeling Framework
(EMF) and
Graphical Editing
Framework (GEF) are two important projects from the
Eclipse Tools Project
which are successfully used within several other Eclipse projects and
numerous Eclipse-based applications. These are commonly used together
to provide visual design surfaces for domain models expressed with
EMF. Although examples of how to bridge these two technologies exist
(e.g.
Eclipse Development using the Graphical Editing Framework and the
Eclipse Modeling Framework,
eDiagram
GEF Sample), what is needed is a generative infrastructure to
simplify their use in building modeling applications in Eclipse.
The Graphical Modeling Framework project will provide the fundamental
infrastructure and components for developing visual design and modeling
surfaces within Eclipse. In essence, GMF will form a generative bridge
between EMF and GEF, while a future project goal may be to remove the
dependency on EMF and/or GEF.
We propose this project should be undertaken as an incubator within the
Eclipse Technology Project.
It is intended to complement EMF and GEF, which are both found in the
Eclipse Tools Project, and
where it is anticipated GMF will ultimately reside.