How to organize?

Clearly, I'm not a natural born blogger, but with things winding down on Callisto and some time being afforded to our duties on the Modeling PMC, Ed and I have been working with the rest of the PMC to determine how to best organize the projects found within the Eclipse Modeling Project.

At present, it seems we have agreed on several categories: abstract syntax development (think EMF), concrete syntax development (think GMF), model transformation (think JET and forthcoming QVT), model exchange and integration (think MDDi), modeling tools based largely on industry standards (think UML2), and a place for research and emerging technologies to incubate (think GMT). These should nicely categorize what appear to be 9 emerging projects within Modeling, from an organizational/provisioning standpoint:

- Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)
- Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF)
- Textual Modeling Framework (TMF)
- Model to Model Transformation (M2M)
- Model to Text Transformation (M2T)
- Model Development Tools (MDT)
- Generative Modeling Tools|Technologies (GMT)
- Model Driven Development integration (MDDi)

The task is rather complex, given the need to ensure each project can form and maintain the required communities, have adequate contributor diversity, provide the level of interoperability expected as part of a more comprehensive and cohesive whole, leverage a common infrastructure for builds and reporting, align their development cycles, etc. Leadership for each project is key, as is a dedicated list of contributors and member companies. Of course, this is an advertisement for additional help by way of contribution ;-)

MDT is a project inspired by the user community and repeated hints from Mike Milinkovich regarding the the need for more end user "tooling" from the Modeling project. We seem to have an abundance of frameworks and low-level technologies for modeling, but not much by way of what most expect to find (read: a free UML modeling tool). Of course, this is fueled by the fact that "other" free modeling tools exist, making Eclipse a bit of a laggard in this area (sorry, Mike). Hopefully, now that we have the key components in place (EMF, GMF, UML2), getting the community focused on providing this won't take much longer.

Now, if I maintain my current frequency of blog entries... see you in September! ;-)