Why openArchitectureWare moved to Eclipse.org

openArchitectureWare started as an open source project on SourceForge.net, drew a lot of attention within the modeling community and quickly became the open source tool of choice for model driven development. Back then, most oAW committers only were able to work on oAW in their spare time.

Starting with oAW 4, we had a very strong Eclipse integration. Many people began to build their solutions on top of openArchitectureWare. It was only a question of time when projects at Eclipse would become interested in consuming oAW technology. The Eclipse bylaws clearly state that projects at Eclipse may only consume IP-clean code under an EPL-compatible license.

In order to achieve better consumability for Eclipse.org projects, we decided to move the code of the core oAW components to Eclipse.

Projects at SF.net can define their own processes, which in our case resulted in almost having no a process at all. However, we realized the processes at Eclipse.org are mature and stable while at the same time they are lightweight. Yearly simultaneous releases result in a constant beat / rhythm for projects - which in turn results in fresh, modern releases for the community once a year. Something you can count on.

In addition, Eclipse has a very good visibility, adding to oAW's popularity. The Eclipse Modeling Project can be seen as the de-facto industry standard for modeling. Being a part of this success story is a good thing as well.

Overall, we realized oAW's value would be increased by moving to Eclipse.

At present, the core components have been moved to suitable projects at Eclipse:

• TMF/Xtext
• M2T/Xpand
• EMFT/MWE

The code of these components can be found in their respective CVS modules.

In addition, we have established the openArchitectureWare working group (http://www.eclipse.org/workinggroups/oaw/) which serves as a starting point for people interested in model driven software development with Eclipse technology. The oAW working group is an umbrella for the core oAW components and will pursue the following goals:

• provide downloads (distributions) of openArchitectureWare, based on tools and frameworks from the Eclipse Modeling Project (EMP), such as Xpand (incl. Xtend and Check), MWE, EMF, and so forth.
• provide documentation (articles, tutorials) for openArchitectureWare, either by creating these articles and tutorials or by linking to already existing articles and tutorials at sites such as the Eclipse.org articles corner.
• provide opportunities (e.g. regular meetings / mailing lists) to discuss and propose the roadmap for openArchitectureWare and its constituent components
• provide a forum (not in a technical sense, rather in the sense of "a space where people gather to talk")
• follow the Eclipse guidelines and processes
• provide communication channels such as mailing lists and newsgroups on Eclipse.org

We invite the oAW community to join us at Eclipse.org and use the communication channels available at Eclipse.org, such as the newsgroups, support forums, mailing lists, bugzilla and the wiki to get in contact with the committers of the Eclipse Modeling Project and the openArchitectureWare core components.

The roadmap for the move looks like this:

• provide a Eclipse distribution containing all core oAW components (available as of now)
• provide communication channels (bugzilla, newsgroups, support forums) for all of those components (available as of now)
• inform oAW 4.3.x users of the move (happening now)

To be very clear about this: the contents of the support forums at openArchitectureWare.org will remain available. Forum users will be informed about this step via a sticky post in each forum. The primary support (fixes and features) will happen only at Eclipse from now on. Still, itemis offers professional support for migration or special needs in running oAW 4 projects.

Last Updated Sunday, September 20 2009 @ 11:25 AM CEST; 3.156 Hits