[sirius-dev] Sirius @ ECE

[Cédric Brun <cedric.brun@xxxxxxx>]

Hi folks, EclipseCon Europe was last week, here are a few notes from my 
perspective:

Many people came to us (Maxime, me, or at the Obeo booth) to express how 
they liked Sirius when they tried it. They are
really *excited* about what they can achieve so quickly, so congrats to 
you ! Just like last year, the fast bugzilla and forum answering makes 
everything smoother.

The Xtext+Sirius subject is quite hot, my talk (slides here [1]) on the 
subject drawn quite a lot of peoples and triggered many discussions to 
the point that a BOF was proposed on Tuesday by users on this specific 
topic in addition to the "Sirius BOF" of Wednesday night.
Both bofs went flawlessly except the room we had had no tables (which 
makes a tutorial-like BOF harder), users could go through the tutorial 
and finish it
with pretty much no assistance and where quite happy with it. My 
personnal experience of the Wednesday bof is that it actually turned 
more into a discussion and exchanges with users already adopting Sirius 
(which is good too !).

From what I saw, most peoples are still in a fairly early stage and are 
using the "basic" features of Sirius. Those who went further than the 
basics came to us speaking about uses cases where they would like Sirius 
to not be so visible, or would have a user experience closer to the 
classic "Eclipse Editor" one.
- not leveraging the Modeling Project (which is actually possible 
already, but the UI are still there unless you leverage the anwkard 
Eclipse "capabilities" mechanism)
- declaring an Eclipse Editor which leverages Sirius behind the scene 
(which is sort of possible already but is barely tested, no documented 
and is probably not flexible enough to cover many use cases)
We might want to think a bit about this "class of usage" and try to list 
use cases, maybe by asking the community.

Other advanced users are looking for proper APIs to "hook" into some 
places of Sirius, notably :
- programmatically creating/updating palette entries
- programmatically compute Layers, basically just like if we had a 
"LayerMapping" (and next people will ask the  "DiagramMapping" ;) )

The jump from 1.0 to 2.0 and then 3.0 in June scares people a bit. It 
would be useful to have a clear statement on the website about what we 
are actually changing. Technically speaking we make sure the models are 
loaded and migrated "on the fly" meaning that a modeler based on Sirius 
1.0 which is not using an impacted Java API and gets deployed in Sirius 
2.0 should *just work* or this is a migration bug.  Regarding the Java 
API we take extra care about the "APIs most peoples are using" and are 
not breaking those. We might want to express this clearly at least in a 
blog post and try to publish the actual API changes between both 
versions in a better way than the release notes [3]. The fact that 
EcoreTools 2.0 which actually uses quite a few APIs can run on both 
Sirius 1.0 and 2.0 could be publicized as an example of that policy.

Performance is always a concern, the ongoing work and my blog post [1] 
regarding this effort helped a lot as it gives at least an idea of what 
we are aiming to.

Consistency is a concern too, the fact that the "representation refresh" 
can be made "on demand" is really reassuring to users, people got burnt 
already with the "let's change everything and fail if something is not 
up-to-date" of other technologies. This kind of resilience (the diagram 
will just diplay markers on "unavailable" elements)  is useful in many 
situations. That being said, we need a proper API or at least document 
how one can plug its own "Automatic Refresh "strategy. Somebody also 
mentionned the Rename/Move participants during the conference (which we 
tracked already).

The gallery is a very useful tool to show what others did with Sirius 
already. Good timing in publishing it right before the conference !

I'll open a few bugzillas to capture these potential evolutions.

Again, congrats and keep up the good work !


[1] http://fr.slideshare.net/cbrun/xtext-sirius
[2] 
http://model-driven-blogging.blogspot.fr/2014/10/sirius-20-under-hood.html
[3] https://www.eclipse.org/sirius/doc/Release%20Notes.html