New functionnalities have been added to improve the usability of graphical designers created with Obeo Designer.
A contextual toolbar is integrated within the editor. It provides the main actions which can pe performed on the current diagram and on the model elements displayed on it
It is now very easy to select the model elements to show or hide on a diagram.
Model elements can be pinned on a diagram to prevent them from moving during an automatic layout.
The Ctrl+O keystroke opens a dialog box containing all the model elements contained on the current diagram. From this dialog box, it is possible to find and select a model element on the diagram.
The label of the selected model elements can be hidden from the diagram.
It is now possible to open a designer without creating a session. A session can be created on the fly, stored in a temporary folder and automatically removed after the editor has been closed.
Trees bring a hierarchical viewpoint of datas, as they can provide a lot of informations in a clear and concise way. Obeo Designer 5.0 introduces this new kind of representation with Drag & Drop, Direct Edit, Navigation, etc.
Popup can be added to allow the user to perform specific actions on model elements.
Sequence Diagrams are now supported by Obeo Designer 5.0. Inspired by UML, this new kind of representation can be used with any DSL.
Complex sequence diagrams can be created, thanks to the management of combined fragments.
Several new features have been added to customize the graphical rendering of model elements.
Colors of model elements can be dynamically computed by defining expressions (OCL, Acceleo, etc.)
Interpolated colors can be defined to generate colors depending of the object properties.
The label of a container can be displayed in a corner compartment.
Buttons in the palette can be visible depending on a precondition.
Obeo Designer 5.0 integrates Acceleo 3.0 as the solution for code generation and synchronization between models and generated code.
Acceleo is an official project of the Eclipse Foundation since 2009 and has become the reference solution for the Eclipse code generation. The new version implements the MTL syntax, the OMG standard based on OCL.
Acceleo 3.0 provides most of the features that can be expected from a top quality code generator IDE (editor, debugger, profiler, etc.)
ATL 3.1 comes with lots of improvements:
Auto-completion, navigation, documentation, searchs
Breakpoints, step-by-step debugging, etc
Gives the time spent during each step of the model transformation
JAR export, API launching
Obeo Designer is based on Eclipse 3.6 (Helios).
I still supports Eclipse 3.3 (Europa), 3.4 (Ganymede) and 3.5 (Galileo).
Read the many others improvements described in the Change Log.
