Eclipse eTrice 0.4.0 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.

Project
Release

0.4.0

Description

This release introduces the

dynamic features of ROOM.

It will be possible to have optional actor instances which are created on demand at runtime. With this last major feature our implementation of the ROOM language will be complete. Initially dynamic actors will be supported by the Java generator. For the C generation we decided to stick with static systems which require no dynamic memory management.

Another theme will be the full support of the physical and mapping models by the Java generators.

And last not list we will continue to work on the consolidation of the existing code.

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.

 

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.

Release Review