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Eclipse Modeling Framework
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Author: Frank Budinsky, David Steinberg, Ed Merks, Raymond Ellersick, Timothy J. Grose
List Price: $49.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0131425420
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (13 August, 2003)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 41,293
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Best and Only Book on EMF
This is the best and only work on the Eclipse Modeling Framework, which is the code generation engine built into the Eclipse IDE. It's a solid work, but it's one flaw is that it is neither a completely how-to book, nor is it completely architectural work, so it will probably frustrate most readers to some degree. This is the only reason I didn't give it a perfect rating.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Significant Productivity Gains
If you have used Eclipse to program Java, you might have gotten comfortable with its capabilities. Very intuitive and kindly donated by IBM to open source. So when I opened this book, I anticipated oodles of helpful tweaks and shortcuts.But not so. IBM has indeed provided these in the book. But their goals were far more ambitious. The Eclipse Modelling Framework is a serious effort to incorporate into a development environment java, XML and UML. They found, perhaps correctly, that most Java programmers, including, and maybe especially the experienced ones, don't really use UML much. Okay, as an afterthought, to document a code base upon a major release. But rarely as a starting point. So one intent is to seamlessly let java programmers incorporate UML. More strongly, they claim that EMF lets you define a model in any of java, XML or UML. Then simply clicking a button will make EMF generate the other 2 forms. The greatest payoff for this is that it lets programmers, who may not be fluent in UML, make a graphical UML model and thence have EMF make the java code stubs. Much less error prone than doing it manually. There is an analogy here with Spice, if any of you have an electrical engineering background. Until the late 80s, if you wanted to model a circuit in Spice, you typically drew it by hand on paper. Then you manually transcribed these into a text file of netlists that was input into Spice. Slow and very error prone. Then along came MicroSim, Carver Mead's Magic program and others, that let you construct a circuit diagram on a console, and from which you could press a button and a Spice input file would be made. Much more productive. The book offers a similar gain in productivity. All you are asked to risk is your time in understanding the book.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Good book but also read www.eclipse.org articles
First four chapters of this book are an excellent introduction to EMF. Last section of this book wastes too many pages by listing reference APIs. I would highly recommend that you read equally important EMF overview documents available on the www.eclipse.org site before you buy this book.
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