M2T/MTL Relaunch Plan

Status

The MTL relaunch plan has been accepted. The project will be named Acceleo.

• Acceleo project page
• M2T newsgroup (please include "[Acceleo]" in the message subject)

Introduction

The MTL component is an open source component under the Eclipse Modeling / Model To Text (M2T) project. Its primary goal is to provide an implementation of the MOF 2 Text OMG] standard.

This proposal is written to declare its intent and scope.

Background

The Eclipse M2T project aims at developing Model To Text tools and to reduce the duplicate effort involved in developing and maintaining template languages. Currently, there are three languages components within M2T : JET, Xpand and MTL being the OMG MOF Model to Text implementation.

Description

This document focuses on proposing an implementation as an entirely new development of the OMG MOF Model to Text (Mof2Text) language. The implementation will be compliant with the core feature compliance level of the Mof2Text language to start with, then with the advanced feature compliance.

Proposed components

• Standalone components (based on EMF Runtime)
  • Engine: The engine will generate text based on the reflective API of EMF
  • Parser : the compiler creates a EMF representation of the template
• Eclipse IDE components
  • Eclipse Builder with error detection and error marking
  • Template editor with code completion and syntax highlighting
  • Export a generator as a plugin wizard
  • Debugger

Reused components

The Eclipse MTL will be built on top of the Eclipse Platform. EMF will be used for accessing the models by the MTL execution engine and the MTL component will be integrated with the Model Workflow Engine (MWE). It will also participate in building and/or reusing some of the M2T common components like M2T-core and M2T-shared.

The MDT-OCL component will be reused to edit and parse OCL as a sub-language of MTL. It will also be used to interpret OCL by the MTL runtime engine. Reuse of the Eclipse IMP component (http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/imp/) will be considered at the beginning of the project.

The team is composed of the creators and contributors of the Acceleo code generator project (http://www.acceleo.org) and of contributors of MOF 2 Text and QVT-R OMG specifications. No initial contribution will be made for MTL since this will be an entirely new development. The team will re-use its knowledge to build an exemplary implementation of the OMG MOF To Text standard.

Proposed initial committers

• Jonathan Musset – jonathan.musset@obeo.fr - (proposed project lead)
• Arjan Kok - arjan.kok@gmail.com
• Wim Bast - wim.bast@xs4all.nl
• Cedric Brun – cedric.brun@obeo.fr
• Laurent Goubet – laurent.goubet@obeo.fr

Interested parties

• Obeo
• IBM - Ed Merks
• IBM - Paul Elder
• Borland - Rich Gronback
• Bernd Kolb
• CEA List - France
• TATA Consultancy Services (TCS) - Sreedhar Reddy
• modeldriven.org - Cory Casanava
• Arno Haase

Tentative Plan

MTL 1.0 planned for June 2009 including standalone engine and parser, first MTL syntax support, (core feature compliance level of the Mof2Text language) Eclipse IDE components MWE integration and documentation.

In the meantime, component opening is planned for January 2008, and standalone engine will be available by June 2008.