IDE/Eclipse Integration

MDE is most often applied to software projects. Then models and traditional source code complement one another and together form the software product. Within MDE - in contrast to the original CASE methodology - models actually become a part of the working software. Thus it is important that models can be edited in the standard IDE. With OOMEGA there's no tool barrier. You can edit both, models and code, in your favourite IDE - in Eclipse!

Textual Modelling

OOMEGA instantly provides textual model editors for your domain-specific languages. Those Eclipse editors realize both, the background parsing strategy as well as the MVC pattern. Hence you can complement your textual DSL with graphical or form-based editors and edit the very same model with different editors concurrently. At the same time textual editors remain comfortable, i.e. you can type arbitrary words just as you would do in a standard Java editor. As a matter of course there are features like syntax highlighting and hyperlinking.

Database Support

Especially when a large system shall be designed and models become larger and larger you can count on OOMEGA's database support. OOMEGA provides an easy-to-use, powerful and standardized API to db4objects, Hibernate and Versant. Moreover we've implemented an in-memory ODBMS. That's why you can exchange the database back-end at any time and choose the appropriate technology for storing your metamodels and models.

Team Collaboration

OOMEGA technically supports teamwork in two alternative, but complementary ways: interactive modelling and local repositories.

• The former is a highly interactive modelling environment based on a central model database. Whenever you commit your changes others will immediately notice your work as their editors will be notified by OOMEGA's Client/Server protocol.
• Local repositories with the well-known Update/Commit/Merge operations are supported as well. You can simply use CVS or SVN and merge your models on the basis of appropriate textual representations.

Model-to-Text Transformations

Model-to-Text (M2T) transformations are most often needed in MDE projects. OOMEGA offers a built-in code generation engine that is based on Java Server Pages (JSP) technology. Alternatively you are welcome to use openArchitectureWare. OOMEGA's Java Model Access API and query language is used to explore models in the context of JSP or Xpand templates. Hence, whatever code generator you prefer, it will provide more features than simple template processing.

Model-to-Model Transformations

OOMEGA offers Model-to-Model (M2M) transformations by supporting the ATLAS Transformation Language (ATL). ATL is a prominent open source project that provides a M2M transformation language and an interpreter for it. Thanks to the good working relationship to the ATL team member Frédéric Joualt and his support we could implement an OOMEGA-specific virtual machine for ATL.

Java Model Access API / Query Language

One of OOMEGA’s major strengths is an innovative object persistency solution that provides an easy-to-use, powerful and standardized Java API to db4objects, Hibernate, Versant and OOMEGA’s in-memory ODBMS.

The Java Model Access API offers not only a flexible query language but also well-engineered features like transaction management, nested transactions, event notifications, cascading deletions, and dynamic access via reflection.

Automated Builds

Modern software and MDE projects typically rely on automated builds. Apache Ant and Maven are widespread build tools that offer fully-automated, repeatable and customisable software builds.

M2M/M2T transformations are typically part of a build cycle, thus we offer Ant tasks and Maven Mojos for ATL, oAW and OOMEGA’s generator.

XML Support

For compatibility and other reasons it’s quite nice to have an XML binding for metamodels and models.

• XML Schema (XSD) documents can be transformed to metamodels and vice versa.
• XML documents can be transformed to models and vice versa.