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Hello

19 08 09 - 17:42 Hello everybody out there on the screens,

This is the first time my blogging activities appear on planet eclipse, so I will use this post to introduce myself, my blog and my project(s).

I studied computer sciences until July this year in Berlin. Now I am going to start my Ph.D. studies soon.

When I had to choose a topic for my diploma-thesis I first thought of implementing a UML-editor in Eclipse because during my studies I never found an editor which met all my needs. But when I started to google around I noticed that there were still a lot of new projects. So I cancelled this idea. Because I definitively wanted to work with Eclispe during my thesis I redeveloped my first thoughts which ended in the plan to create a collaborative UML-editor. This again led me to GMF and the idea to develop a collaborative extension for GMF editors.
The only problem was that I had only used Eclipse as IDE and did not know anything about GMF, PDE, modelling or even EMF. So I started to dive into the world of Eclipse development. And the result of this is Dawn - a collaborative, web-based extension for GMF editors.

Dawn provides several features. The most interesting of them are:

- firewall transparency, which allows tocommunicate from very restrictive networks
- network independency, which in fact means an offline mode to use Dawn when there is no network available
- conflict handling mechanisms to detect and solve conflicts
- locking mechanisms to get exclusive write permission on GMF objects
- a flexible network adapter system which allows changing the underlying communication system at runtime (currently available: RIM and SOAP)
- a WebViewer which allows viewing the GMF diagram also in a browser. This allows clients like mobile devices to join the collaboration even if they do not have a JVM. First steps for a WebEditor are already done ;)

These are the core features of Dawn. They will be explained more detailed on the projects homepage.

For anyone interested in seeing Dawn in action I suggest checking out the screencast section on the project’s page. But take care. Those are development screencasts which means they show the main steps of the Dawn development progress. If you like to see how Dawn grew more and more watch them from the beginning. If you like to see the latest features just watch them backwards. Which means start with the last, not watching the screencast from behind ;)

You can also run the 'Getting started' form the documentation section, but it bases upon the current, very prototypical version.

Currently Dawn is going to meet CDO which means that the features implemented in Dawn will soon be also available using CDO as underlying platform.

My blog will mostly report about Dawn development but also about my Eclipse experiences and maybe other future projects.

Hope you enjoy it.

Now I am going to meet the 'Modelling Stammtisch' here in Berlin. Maybe I'll see some of you there.

Cheers,

Martin