Thursday, April 9, 2009

Acceleo roadmap : Eclipse foundation and MTL standard

Hi,

Acceleo.org was created 4 years ago, and as the time goes, the Team has been more and more convinced that the MOF Model To Text OMG specification was the way to go for the project. More than one year ago now, we started to code a reference implementation for the standard within the Eclipse M2T project - named MTL. We're now convinced that we'll manage to provide nice tooling, simple syntax and efficient code generation with all the pragmatism we had about Acceleo.org and we asked
the Eclipse Foundation to rename MTL in "Acceleo".

Our goal is this one: a transparent development strategy and stop having two similar projects in 2 places : Eclipse MTL and Acceleo, but in a near future, promote just the Eclipse one as the "Next Gen Acceleo".

We are confident that the Acceleo community gain value from moving to a self hosted project to an Eclipse one, and that end users will follow the transfert from Acceleo.org to Eclipse.org as we will provide the same level of functionnalities and we will insure an interoperability between the old syntax and the new syntax (the standard one).

Don't worry. There aren't a lot of differences between the old version of acceleo and the new one

The Acceleo Team will continue to maintain the old syntax of Acceleo outside of eclipse (www.acceleo.org ) during some few years, but the new versions and features will take place on Eclipse.org. In the next few days you'll get an automated tooling helping you to migrate your templates from a syntax to another.

For Acceleo lover, you will find in Eclipse Acceleo everything you have loved in the Acceleo.org version and more (the standard compliance with more documentation)
This specification is really a good one : http://www.omg.org/spec/MOFM2T/1.0/

At the moment, those who need a perfect stability must continue to use the Acceleo.org version. As time goes on, Eclipse Acceleo is better and better and you can already have a try right now. That said, we still need a couple of month to get the same stability level between our current stable version and the new one.

I'm sure that Eclipse Acceleo will be a success ;-)
You can download the first builds (0.8.0) here :
http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/m2t/downloads/?project=acceleo


A presentation of Eclipse Acceleo took place at Eclipse Conference and had nice feedbacks.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/2009/sessions?id=387

Congrats to all the commiters and contributors involved in the first stable version of this component