Eclipse Sirius 6.4.0 Release Review

New & Noteworthy

• Major improvements in the quality of the ELK integration. Before 6.4 the ELK integration could be used mostly for testing ELK algorithms. Now the most important use cases are much better covered, with ELK algorithms properly invoked in most scenarios, and the feature can be used more confidently. The feature is still considered experimental as there are some outstanding issues identified. Among other improvements and bug fixes in 6.4.0:
  • The management of "arrange selection" and "arrange of new elements at diagram opening" has been improved.
  • After "arrange all" action execution, the diagram has now a top-left margin of 20x20 pixels (in the same spirit as the "Reset Origin" action).
  • The ports authorized sides property is now considered by ELK layouts.
• Major performance improvements in sequence diagrams. Complex diagrams which could take several seconds to refresh and layout are now handled with almost no visible delay. Interactive performance of the validation feedback when moving diagram elements has also been greatly improved.
• Part of the work on sequence diagrams above also improve the refresh performance of standard diagrams, notably the computation of navigation decorators (which indicate if a diagram element has itself other diagrams attached to it).
• Bug 568572 - Add ability to display invalid representations in a dedicated node
• Bug 567805 - Improve analysis selector for better management and understanding
• Bug 563117 - Copy format to existing/new diagram based on source to target semantic elements mapping. This adds a new API to copy the layout between diagrams with different semantic elements, based on a source to target semantic objects mapping function. It can apply a reference layout onto an existing diagram or create a new diagram. It works on both standard diagram and sequence diagram.
• Bug 566075 - Update to SWTBot 3 final

Compatibility

Sirius 6.4 is officially supported on Eclipse 2020-03 to 2020-12, with Eclipse 2020-06 being the reference platform (where the tests are run and verified). It most likely works fine with any Eclipse from 2019-06 onward, but this is not guaranteed.

Also note that Sirius 6.4 is still compatible with Java 8, but has been verified to work with Java 14. We may move to Java 11 (LTS) as minimum required version in 2021. Eclipse 2020-09 already requires Java 11 to start, and Java 8 is quite old at this point. When we move to Java 11 we will drop support for Eclipse versions older than 2020-09. If that is an issue for you, please open a ticket so we can discuss it.

This version (6.4.0) is the one that will be used in Capella 5.0 / Team for Capella 5.0, and in Eclipse 2020-12.

Availability

Sirius 6.4.0 is available from the following update sites:

• https://download.eclipse.org/sirius/updates/releases/6.4.0/2020-03/
• https://download.eclipse.org/sirius/updates/releases/6.4.0/2020-06/
• https://download.eclipse.org/sirius/updates/releases/6.4.0/2020-09/

Deprecations

In order to reduce the maintenance burden of Sirius, we have decided to deprecate some older mechanisms for which there exist better alternatives. In Sirius 6.4.x all of these are still available, but they may be removed in future versions (6.5 or 7.0) without further notice. If any of these planned removals are an issue for you, please open a ticket so we can discuss options.

The features which are deprecated starting from 6.4.0 are:

• Exporting diagrams as GIF, BMP or PDF. We will focus on PNG and JPG support for raster formats, and SVG for vector formats. If you need another image format, use an external tool to do the conversion.
• OCL expressions in VSMs (odesign files), as supported by the org.eclipse.sirius.common.ocl plug-in. Use AQL expressions instead.
• The “Workflow” feature. Workflow was experimental and to our knowledge not used in practice. This corresponds to the org.eclipse.sirius.workflow.* and org.eclipse.sirius.editor.workflow plug-ins.
• The server parts which supported the Workflow feature. It was our first experiment in moving Sirius to the web, but this is now replaced by the newly published Sirius Web. This corresponds to all the org.eclipse.sirius.server.* plug-ins.