Modeling: Home Star Loader

Last week I reported that there are now 70 committers / contributors in Modeling.

Today, Denis announced on the Phoenix mailing list that EMF, EMFT, MDT and GMF are in the top 30 requested home pages for Feb 2009.

The top three popular project pages were, in order: PDT, EMFT, and WTP.

However, if you combine the numbers for the four Modeling subprojects, you get 162K hits for the month, placing Modeling in the #4 slot behind only the Eclipse.org home page, Downloads page, and Categories page, and making us the #1 (aggregate) project page.

Popular Eclipse Projects

Here's what the Popular Projects box looked like on April 1, 2008. No, this isn't a very belated joke. Note that EMF is in the top slot, with MDT in 4th and 4 other projects who use or depend on at leat one Modeling project. Yay, Team Modeling.

A few months later, Modeling has captured 4th, 6th, and 7th, with 3 projects depending on them -- still 60% of the board using some Modeling! With UML2 3.0 starting up, will MDT move back up?

WTP and PDT continue to dominate in the top 3, just ahead of CDT (whose downloads get shared with Sourceforge due to the success of the Windows-only spin-off project, Wascana). By the way, PDT released a new 2.0 Integration build this week, fixing 48 bugs.

Curiously, the Visual Editor (VE) continues to live on the leaderboard, even though its last official build at Eclipse.org was over a year and a half ago. To me that says there's still a lot of community interest in this project. One of these days it'll be up and running again, under Dash's new Common Builder, and maybe get some new committers or contributors to help develop its 1.4 release. Stay tuned.

A wise man once said statistics seldom make you feel better. But they can be fun.

Modeler Bees

And now a little ditty to cheer up my fellow modelers out there on this miserably wet & grey day. If you're not already a regular in #eclipse-modeling, please drop in and say hi! Thanks to Dave Steinberg for his invaluable assistance in writing this one, and to Ed for the bee pic.

March on, modeler bees!
Know your MDD!

We take our orders given by the spec
Our PMC leaders are Ed and Rich
If you resist us you will feel our sting
Don't code by hand when you can use codegen

Control input with importers!
Control output with genmodel!
Follow the schema totally!
We can reuse our models

March on, modeler bees!
Use your MDT!

A Ph.D. once coming from the west,
And in a flash! OMG, made a nest
Supply of models flowing bottomless
Input any form, you're not powerless

Bidi reference handshaking!
Reflection: code generically!
Conform to schema totally!
We save time with our models

And we'll merge... along, with our genmodel
And we'll fly... our JETs, with our templates drawn
Can the suits... in blue, believe what we've done?
We can regen our models

And we'll merge... along, with our codegen on
And define... constraints, validators drawn
Can even... record, changes that we've done
When we modify data

Can we persist our models?
Yes, go see E-M-F-T!

Billy Talent - Worker Bees

Lies, damned lies, and a side order of acronym soup

By my calculations, EMF has scored over 2 million download requests since 2006-01-01. That's a huge number, but it's also an inaccurate number because our stats gen was broken for a while so there's a big hole in the Update Manager download stats. As such it's probably much higher, given the traffic we've had since the stats tool was fixed.

Looking at the overall numbers for all the tracked Modeling projects, we've had 5 million download requests since 2006-01-01 for EMF + M2T + MDT ... and that's just the Update Manager requests!

It's also fun to see who's downloading our bits. As expected, the US tops the chart, with Canada a respectable 8th. To get a sense for where EMF is used consider where the following projects are developed:

1. US: GMF, M2T-JET, WTP, TPTP, VE, ...
3. China: MDT-EODM, TPTP
5. France: EMFT, MDDi, M2M, GMT
8. Canada: EMF & EMF-QTV, MDT (UML2 & OCL), M2T-JET, GEF, GMF, WTP, TPTP, ...
12. The Netherlands: EMFT-Teneo
17. Czech Republic: GMF, MDT-UML2 Tools

To paraphrase Ed and the Zulu people, "umuntu ngumuntu MDD!" ;-)

EMFT: The Ten Components

After a way-too-long hiatus, the EMFT components Net4j and CDO are once again publishing builds, ready to run on Eclipse 3.3 / EMF 2.3 / Europa.

• CDO
• Net4j

Teneo, EMF Compare, and as of this week, Modeling Workflow Engine (MWE) also have builds available. Get them here:

• EMF Compare
• MWE
• Teneo

The other two current components do not yet have builds available, but their code is available for download in CVS:

• JCR Management (JCRM)
• EMF Search

Coming soon are at least three new components. Stay tuned for more information as they are provisioned.

• Ecore Tools
• Emfatic
• Servus

At least 3 of these components also plan to be included in next year's Ganymede release.