Eclipse eTrice 0.5.0

0.5.0

Description

The themes of the next eTrice release are:

  • eTrice.fsm will allow clients to re-use eTrice state machine models and editors inside their own DSL
  • an improved action code editor with syntax highlighting and content assist
  • consolidation of the existing code base
  • improved documentation and tutorials
  • improved usability
  • minor new features

The first item is a major re-factoring which allow clients to build on the feature rich language and tools of eTrice independently of the ROOM language.

Interested parties are invited to join the developer mailings list.

API Certification

The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".

Architectural Issues
  • eTrice has been built on top of the popular EMF and Xtext and the new Graphiti framework.
  • Emphasis has been laid on a simple and sound architecture. Continuous refactorings have been done to keep the architecture clear and concise.
  • eTrice is still in its beginning. The ways it can be adopted and extended will evolve together with a growing community of users.

 

Security Issues

None

Non-Code Aspects
  • Online documentation (Eclipse Help) is provided and available also in PDF form. The HTML pages can also be accessed from the eTrice Documentation page
  • Several Tutorials are available from basic to more advanced and comprehensive.
  • Tutorial code is shipped with the eTrice bundles and is easily installable to the user's workspace.

 

Usability Details
  • From the very beginning simplicity of use has been a major goal of the eTrice project.
  • ROOM as a modeling language allows the user to solve typical problems of the development of highly concurrent real-time systems on a higher level of abstraction.
  • All editors, textual and graphical, are simple to use and designed to support a fast development.
  • The tutorials have been re-worked and simplified

 

End of Life

None

Standards
  • The modeling language ROOM is not standardized in a strict and formal way but was published in [1].
  • [1] defines a graphical notation which was adopted.
  • [1] also contains a textual notation. But this is incomplete and we decided to develop our own notation based on this.

[1] Bran Selic, Garth Gullekson, Paul T. Ward: Real-Time Object Oriented Modeling, New York: John Wiley, 1994 (ISBN 0-471-59917-4)

 

Communities

Since its start in October 2010 the project has won four additional committer and several contributors. Three Google Summer of Code and one bachelor student had projects related to eTrice. Talks have been given on a number of conferences. eTrice is already used as part of the tool chain in industry projects. Up to now eTrice users and developers mainly use direct communication. Therefore the newsgroup and the development mailing list are only rarely used.