Eclipse Community Awards 2012

For all of the potential value that can be derived by model-driven engineering, anyone who has ever dealt with models knows the usual pain points: information overload, complexity, lack of integration with any other tools, and spaghetti visualization. For organizations like Ericsson who sponsored this project, not only are models part of standard development activities, the models in questions are cumbersome, heavyweight and complex.

For over 5 years, Mylyn (previously Mylar) has been reducing complexity, driving productivity, and facilitating high quality code for Eclipse developers struggling with many of the same problems facing model-driven engineering. The innovative task-focused interface, the core integrations, and the supporting framework have resulted in dramatic productivity gains and collaboration between groups often separated by geography and language.

By combining the two, the Eclipse Model Focusing Tools (MFT) project is bringing the benefits of Mylyn to model-driven development and a variety of graphical modeling tools including Ecore Tools, GMF, and Papyrus. The modeled objects can be directly tracked with Mylyn tasks, enabling the wide range of integrations available via Mylyn. Through innovative approaches to visualization, MFT provides a focused mode for diagrams that shows only the elements related to the task-at-hand, dramatically reducing information overload for engineers working on large models. In addition, the task-focused interface extensions provide Mylyn’s one-click multitasking facilities for working with models, ensuring that developers can instantly recover from interruptions, and share model-specific expertise, when working with models in addition to what Mylyn already provides for engineers working with source code.

Another screenshot can be found at http://wiki.eclipse.org/images/c/c7/EcoreMylyn.png and a video can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnbzyrlUzlA

Project URL: http://www.eclipse.org/projects/project.php?id=mylyn.context.mft