Eclipse EMF Diff/Merge 0.3.0 Release Review

Type
Release
State
Successful
End Date of the Review Period

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Release

0.3.0

Description

EMF Diff/Merge is a diff/merge tool for models. Its main purpose is to help build higher-level tools that need to merge models based on consistency rules. GUI components are also provided. Typical usages include model refactoring, iterative model transformations, bridges between models or modeling tools, collaborative modeling environments, or versioning systems.

This is the Luna release of EMF Diff/Merge. It provides better flexibility and customization facilities in order to cover a wider range of usages and integration scenarios.

API Certification

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

Architectural Issues

EMF Diff/Merge is made of two components:

  • A diff/merge engine. This component can be customized/extended via model scopes (what to compare), match and diff policies (how to compare) and merge policies (how to merge).
  • A GUI component which relies on the engine. This component provides an extension point which allows specifying engine customizations that are made available in the GUI.

In addition, each component comes with a simple customization for GMF scopes (diagrams and models) that illustrates the overall extendibility of the technology.

 

Security Issues

No security issue identified.

Non-Code Aspects

The complete EMF Diff/Merge documentation is available from the EMF Diff/Merge Wiki page:

 

Usability Details

EMF Diff/Merge intends to conform to the User Interface Guidelines.

End of Life

No EMF Diff/Merge component is deprecated so far.

Standards

EMF Diff/Merge does not implement any standard.

Communities

EMF Diff/Merge obtained the "Most innovative project/feature" award at EclipseCon World 2013. It is a young project whose usage is spreading.

The forum, bugzilla and Gerrit show activity by different people and organizations. In particular, several Gerrit pull requests have been submitted by people external to the project.

Questions on the forum arise on a regular basis, some of them receiving significant attention: the thread with the highest number of views has a total of almost 14,000 views.

This release is part of Luna

To sum up, this release review corresponds to an improved version of the engine and UI parts, mainly for better flexibility and customization.