« This is my legacy ...… | Home |

It's dawning

11 07 10 - 12:25 It has been a year since I announce that 0.1 is released. At this time Dawn based on an own small model repository and provided real-time shared editing for GMF diagrams - on a basic level.

Dawn 0.1 came with a flexible communication mechanism which allowed switching the underlying transport protocol (at this time SOAP and RMI were implemented) at runtime. With an HTTP-based protocol in the background Dawn was (nearly) immune to firewall restriction. Dawn was also able to detect and visualize conflicts and to clear those on selected diagram elements. To avoid conflicts the user was able to lock certain parts of the diagram exclusively. As you might guess, this feature certainly needs some sort of a user management in the back end. This user management allowed to set access rights for every user and to control the rights for every diagram (read, write, modify). System administrators could grant/revoke these rights using a web-bainterfacesed interface. This interface came along with a simple portal to view the GMF diagrams and their changes in real-time in a browser. Dawn 0.1 even provided some basic editing functionality from within the web-browser.

But Dawn 0.1 also had some drawbacks. The performance on bigger models was rather poor. Also the design was far from being perfect. It was also clear that maintaining an own model repository in competition to CDO would be a hard job as single committer. Not that I do not like challenges, but this one was a bit out of my scope ;) This led to the idea to re-implement Dawn on CDO. So, I became a CDO committer ... and got sidetracked a bit learning all the new stuff.

It took a while since a found time to look at Dawn again, but here we are one year later and I am proud to announce that Dawn 0.2 is out now. Now, Dawn is based on CDO and is treated as one of its sub components. So you can receive it from the Helios update site or the latest CDO builds.

As a gift for its 0.2nd birthday, Dawn got its own brand new logo. Here it is:

I addition a new wiki page will serve as entry point for every information around Dawn. If you are interested in Dawn have a look at the getting started section. Or, if you want to generate generate your own client fragment for your GMF editor, visit this tutorial .

There are some features which are not yet re-implemented (e.g the web viewer, locking or authentification). If are you are interested in these features track the features page or the related bugzillas.

Dawn will not be limited to GMF. In fact it is going to provide collaborative access to every UI which has an underlying EMF model und thus can be stored in a CDO repository. I leave it up to you to image what this could include ;)