Eclipse Sirius 5.0.0 Release Review

Sirius 5.0 is a major new release which focuses on streamlining the end-user experience.



In particular, it features:

• direct support for wizards and dialogs in modelers definition, using the same vocabulary as for properties views support (introduced in version 4.0), which allows for better UX in modelers (#496060);
• a new form-based editor for Sirius (.aird) files which provides end-users complete overview of their models and representations, and direct access to the most common operations, avoiding reliance on hard-to-discover context menus (#510040, #514682);
• on diagrams, a new decorator mechanism has been introduced which composes better in complex modelers with many extensions (#506259);
• improved image resolution of exported diagrams (#507056);
• the ability for end-users to force the use of the standard Eclipse font for Sirius trees, when the values defined in the modeler definition are not adapted (#430948).

For specifiers, in addition to the aforementioned support for wizards & dialogs definition, this version also features:

• improved static validation (#510126, #509930) and completion in the VSM editor (#479049);
• support for partial/incremental (re-)definition of properties views and wizards/dialogs (#496065, #512165);
• automatic creation of "canonical" properties views based on the target type's features (#510205);
• a new 'Let' operation to define local variables and avoid repeated evaluation of common sub-expressions (#443698);
• support for OCL/AQL syntax in the VSM editor when specifying target types (#507065).

On the technical/internal side:

• this version now requires Java 8 (#495701) and drops support for Eclipse Mars: it is now only compatible with Neon and Oxygen (#507474). It is also compatible with Guava 21.
• preparatory work has been merged that will lead in future versions to better scalability in cases where there are many representations, most of which are not used at a given time (#493353). This should have no visible effect on this version, but the mechanisms put in place will be exploited in future versions.