I would like to introduce myself and this new blog where the team will provide the latest information on the EDT (EGL Development Tools) project on Eclipse. While the our first official release of EDT is still in the works (version 0.7.0 is coming soon!), we wanted to get the communication started to foster a vibrant open-source community for crafting of this technology. Come here to find the status of the project, plans and design discussions, as well as how-to articles.
My name is Tim W Wilson and I am the project lead for the EDT project. For the past decade or so, I have been the lead architect for IBM Rational Business Developer which contained the previous proprietary incarnation of EGL (Enterprise Generation language).
The movement of this proprietary technology to the open source arena is what the EDT project is all about. Yet it is more than just moving this technology to a new space. The new EGL is a generalization of this programming language technology. EGL is now extensible such that abstract concepts can be added to the language similar to how UML Profiles add semantics to models. The code generation is designed to be easily extensible such that these new concepts can be folded into existing code generators. Plus, a full set of Eclipse-based IDE tools used to create, build and debug EGL applications is also part of the grand scheme.
What is this grand scheme you ask? Without going into too much detail, the purpose of EDT is to provide a platform for building extensible model compilers where the models and the implementation of the operations on those models is fully specified in a programming language, i.e. the Model is the Code. Approaches like UML and action languages are along similar lines but the new EGL starts as a programming language for everything instead of pictures mixed with code. This together with a highly extensible code generation infrastructure leads to the ability to create domain specific compilers. A good example of how such technology can be used is to be able to target Android, iOS and web runtime platforms all with the same code. (Look for a blog post on that topic in the near future.)
As we put the finishing touches on EDT version 0.7.0, we hope you will download EDT and let us know what you think. We encourage you to provide comments and questions on the eclipse-egl forum.
Remember to check back at this blog. We looking forward to sharing more exciting news about EDT.
Tim
