Modeling: From Zero to Seventy

Remember when no one had heard of EMF? When it was just Ed Merks, Frank Budinsky, and Dave Steinberg? Me neither.

These days modeling is everywhere, and with good reason. There are now a total of 70 people contributing to and committing for the various Modeling projects, the most recent additions being from MDT (Papyrus, BPMN2), EMF (CDO), and TMF (Xtext).

So, is it any surprise that there are 29 Modeling Track talks this year at EclipseCon, from the introductory Mega Modeling Mania BoF to the double-black-diamond GMF and QVT: roads (finally) crossed?

And that's not even including a couple of e4 talks about The Modeled UI in Eclipse e4 and The e4 Programming Model Across Web and Desktop or one about Designing an Android Domain Specific Modeling Language using EMF, GEF and GMF!

I guess some people are just unbearably stupid, eh?

Where in the world is Modeling Sandiego?

A couple days ago, I pointed out some stats about Popular Eclipse Projects.

Today, let's look at some more detailed stats about the Modeling Project itself, thanks to Google Analytics, which has been installed at on www.eclipse.org since July 19, 2008.

In just under two months since we turned on stat tracking, we've gotten over 90,000 Visits & 300,000 Pageviews from over 40,000 Visitors hailing from over 150 Countries!

View larger images

Not included in the screenshots above are some interesting stats about user agents -- what people are using to visit the Modeling Project's site. As you'd probably expect, it's mostly Firefox, IE, and Opera. But would you believe five Playstation hits? Would you believe a Nokia N80, two SonyEricsson phones, but no shoe phones? How about over 1000 hits from Google Chrome users? (I'm so jealous there's no Chrome for Linux yet!) Here's the complete list:

Rank   User-Agent   Hits   (%)
1.  Firefox  56,037  (59.17%)
2.  Internet Explr 30,649  (32.36%)
3.  Opera  2,745  (2.90%)  
4.  Safari  2,297  (2.43%)  
5.  Mozilla  1,373  (1.45%)  
6.  Chrome  1,174 (1.24%)  Already in the #6 spot!
7.  Konqueror 319  (0.34%)  
8.  SeaMonkey 29  (0.03%)  
9.  (not set) 18  (0.02%)  
10.  Mozilla Compatible Agent 12  (0.01%)  
11.  Netscape 12  (0.01%)
12.  Camino  8  (0.01%)
13.  Galeon  8  (0.01%)
14.  Playstation 3 4
15.  Googlebot 2
16.  MyBrowser; MyWindows 2
17.  NetFront 2
18.  SmallProxy 3.4.1 Free 2
19.  Axis2 1
20.  DoCoMo 1
21.  Jakarta Commons-HttpClient 1
22.  MSIE 7.0 1
23.  NETSCAPE FOREVER 1
24.  NokiaN80 1
25.  OpenWave 1
26.  Playstation Portable 1
27.  SonyEricssonW910i 1
28.  X-Browser 1
29.  aaa 1
30.  iexplorer 7.0 WebWasher 3.4 1
31.  openwave 1
32.  preview 1
33.  sonyericssonk750i 1

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Wondering how you can track your eclipse.org site's stats using your own Google Analytics account? Here's how:

  # see http://wiki.eclipse.org/Using_Phoenix#Google_Analytics
  $App->SetGoogleAnalyticsTrackingCode("UA-2345678-9"); # use your UA account

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.

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!" ;-)

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

With Europa out of the way (well, mostly), it was time to take a week off (give or take a few bugs and some IRC lurking), catch up on my TV viewing, do some paddling with my new kayak over at Rouge Beach, cycle a few dozen kms on my bike, play with my dogs and take in a few shows, including Transformers (the new Michael Bay whatsit at the Docks drive-in, thankfully free courtesy of the folks at Chevrolet), Vida, We Will Rock You, and a second helping of Evil Dead: The Musical (because you just HAVE to see it more than once).

Groovy.