I'm taking the opportunity of a long airport connection to capture
(while it's fresh) and report to you what happened during this
week of conference. There was 619 attendees for the whole
conference.
Attendees interested in modeling knew about Sirius, the most I met
had tried it (or did so during the tutorial) and they all knew
what Sirius was about and what problems it fixes.
We had an informal BOF session: discussing with adopters, showing
what can be done and we even had a demo of a modeler built with
Sirius by the EMF Parlsey team which was very cool!
That's also the first year so many people came to me during
EclipseCon just for saying that they love Sirius. Digging
further, what they like the most is:
- First and foremost is the productivity. They could get the
result they wanted in very little time.
- Second is the quality of the tooling they get, those many
"small" yet important features that their users are discovering
when using their own modelers.
- Sirius + Xtext working together is also perceived as a strong
asset. BTW I also discussed with the Xtext team and new things are
coming in the next version which can notably improve the
experience, the serialization for instance is getting an important
performance boost...
- This one I did not expect: some had to extend quite a lot the
default behavior, regarding layout in particular, and found that
it was way easier to do so in Sirius than when they had their own
GEF/GMF modeler. That is an illustration of the fact that we
should not forget that java API, even way more complex than
specifying in the .odesign editor are still a valid and efficient
answer for many users.
- The "seamless upgrade" of the .odesign model is also really
appreciated and helped users in moving quicker on the new version.
We said it, now they have been experiencing it several times and
like it.
All this feedback was filled with excitement, congrats to the team
for such a success ! Some also mentioned the excellent support on
the forum or bugzilla. Keep up the good work!
I also asked about areas to improve and the most common requests
were related to the .odesign tooling and getting capabilities to
debug the specification. Queries are seen as indeed a powerful
mechanism yet something which can get quite hard to get right
(even when starting with AQL). The package.Type and package::Type
mismatch came up several times during the tutorial leading to
non-working queries.
Also some areas in the .odesign editor are still pretty poor
regarding the validation (style customization for instance). Some
users did not even know about the "validate" action to check a
query. They do "manage" though as you can iterate very quickly
with "try something, see if it works, try a new way". The
"problem view" error reporting was not even known.
The discoverability of what you can do is also a problem for many
specifiers. It was mentioned that a generic action to create
"New.." Then ask the type, then ask where in the .odesign model to
put it could help in some cases...
That being said, the focus on the features targeting the end user
vs the specifier is appreciated.
A "Create a Viewpoint Specification project from Ecore files"
wizard providing default diagrams based on an EClass entry point
was also mentioned quite a few times. They have that in Xtext and
that's highly appreciated as a means to get started.
On the "end user" side the lack of a proper .aird editor (meaning:
useful and declared as an editor in Eclipse) clearly impairs the
use of the toolings in perspectives which are not "Modeling".
The new properties view support has been really well received and
is important for 90℅ of those users. That's consistent with what
we've seen on the Sirius Forum lately. Mélanie and Stéphane
gathered more specific feedback on the properties view.
I had quite a few mentions of "Eclipse Sirius on Che" by users and
we discussed possible paths that we could take to reach
integration of the two technologies. I still have quite a few open
questions, but something really nice could be done. Anybody
interested in funding a prototype or working on it can contact me.
All in all a lot of positive signs and a great event! Feel free to
track bugzillas related to this feedback if you want to get some
changes considered for the next release (I'm just too tired and
with a connectivity which is too low to do it right now). Next
step is SiriusCon on the 15th of November, the future is looking
good!
--
Cédric
Brun
CTO
+33
2 51 13 51 42
@bruncedric
7 Boulevard Ampère - Carquefou -
France
obeo.fr | twitter | linkedin
