Here‘s a guy who has created a 3D editor to create the mapping model:
Everyone who has ever worked with GMF knows that it can be painful due to the steep learning curve and the tools it provides for editing the GMF models. The complexity of the models in combination with the very basic tooling makes learning and using GMF harder than it should be. Recently, efforts have been made to improve this situation. There is for example EuGenia, which was presented at the ESE 2009. EuGenia uses annotations to add information to the domain model so that the GMF GraphModel and MapModel can be generated automatically. For my diploma thesis however, I followed a different approach to improve the GMF tooling. Jens gave me the task to create a 3D graphical editor for the GMF mapping model. I would like to present the result of my efforts in this blog entry.
The basic concept for such an editor can be summed up by the following bullet points:
- The editor should display the domain model, the GraphModel, the ToolModel and the MapModel together in a 3D view.
- The models should be visualized graphically, thus a graphical notation must be developed for each of them.
- References from the MapModel to the other models should be visualized using 3D connections.
- It should be possible to edit the MapModel entirely by dragging elements from the other models (or rather, their diagrams) to the MapModel. The user should not need to use any other methods to edit the MapModel.
- The editor should create as many elements of the MapModel automatically to assist the user.
