ATL Editor enhancements

ATL 3.1 will bring major enhancements, especially in the ATL source files editor. Here is a quick overview of the new features:

Hover informations

Open declaration (both available with F3 and Ctrl-click)

And finally, the long-awaited advanced content assist... now working at any level on OCL expressions and enhanced with code templates

At this time you can test those new features using latest ATL CVS (HEAD branch) source code.

ATL plug-ins

ATL 3.1 will provide a new feature which help to achieve ATL programmatic launch: the ATL plugin wizard. This utility first will ask you for transformation parameters (metamodels, libraries paths, transformation modules paths), like below:

Then a new plug-in will be generated, embedding:

• the transformation modules and libraries
• a propery file containing URIs, atl file paths
• a Java class which allow to programmatically launch the ATL transformation

Finally you will be able to launch the transformation using the generated main, or integrating the launcher class into an existing application.

You can test this new wizard using the last 3.1 Milestone build.

ATL Galileo Release

ATL 3.0.0 has just been successfully released, and introduce a lot of improvements at both UI and API level. Consult the News and Noteworthy page for more details.

New ATL stack traces

Here is a good new for those who ever suffered reading ATL VM's stack traces: ATL3.0.0 provides console hyperlinks which allow to follow errors just by clicking, as you can see below.

A simple ATL/Prefuse Use Case

I recently discovered prefuse (better late than never) and the various examples made me imagine an ATL use case: creating several points of view from a given UML2 model. Let's see what it consists on, using for example a model standing for the ATL Virtual Machine structure.

So, a pop-up dynamically launch a set of ATL transformation on a model:

The Tree View shows a containment tree of classes and packages:

The Graph View shows an association sub-net (with a lot of parameters... useless in our case but quite fun):

Those views are quite simplistic - I didn't change original prefuse demos - but could be extended to display more data from the input model.

This example, and other advanced model transformation techniques will be explained in the EclipseCon 2009 ATL tutorial.

Phoenix from the Flames: ATL Docs

We have a new strategy for ATL documentation: it was sometimes hard to find an up-to-date and complete version of ATL docs... Now all informations have been merged into the ATL wiki, on three main pages:
- http://wiki.eclipse.org/ATL/Concepts
- http://wiki.eclipse.org/ATL/User_Guide
- http://wiki.eclipse.org/ATL/Developer_Guide

Those page will also be available offline, into the eclipse.help ATL doc plugin (available into ATL SDK builds), thanks to WikiText: this great tool provides a very stable way to convert wiki pages into eclipse.help html pages.

So users (and contributors) are now allowed to modify, update ATL documentation: then relevant corrections will be simply applied on each new ATL build, using WikiText !

ATL flow - eclipse 3.4 update

The ATLflow project allows to graphically chain ATL transformations. The project has just been updated in order to be compatible with eclipse 3.4.

Thanks to Urs Zeidler for this great tool !