Eclipse eTrice 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.

Project
Release

0.3.0

Description

The eTrice release 0.3 has the following themes:

  • Consolidation of Existing Features: Model Editors, Generators and Runtimes (Java and C)
  • Integration of Google Summer of Code Projects

Many bugs have been fixed in the editors, in the code generators and in the runtime libraries and the overall quality could be substantially improved.

The two GSoC projects that have been integrated are about offering the KIELER layout library for the diagrams and an exciting new extended model validation for state machines.

The validation uses a special semantics specification which can be attached to the ROOM protocols.

 

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.
  • Tutorials using C as target language have been added.
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

eTrice is still under heavy development. In some cases we couldn’t avoid even changes in the basic ROOM language. But our community still is very small and thus we don’t have to worry too much about compatibility issues.

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 three 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