Eclipse GMF Runtime

The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) are two important projects from the Eclipse Tools Project which are successfully used within several other Eclipse projects and numerous Eclipse-based applications.  These are commonly used together to provide visual design surfaces for domain models expressed with EMF.  Although examples of how to bridge these two technologies exist (e.g., Eclipse Development using the Graphical Editing Framework and the Eclipse Modeling Framework at http://download.eclipse.org/tools/emf/scripts/docs.php?noHeader=true&doc..., eDiagram GEF Sample), what is needed is a generative infrastructure to simplify their use in building modeling applications in Eclipse.

As an example, the UML2 project is based on EMF and provides an implementation of the OMG’s UML 2.0 metamodel for Eclipse, but currently lacks a diagramming capability.  This and other EMF-based models could benefit from a common infrastructure to ease the development of GEF-based diagramming surfaces where a visual editing component is desired.