SiriusCon 2018 - Talk by Pierre-Charles David, Obeo Sirius Roadmap In 2018 we released Sirius 6.0 and 6.1 with the usual stream of new features, but more significantly we made the first concrete steps towards moving Sirius to the web and the cloud. During this presentation we will: give a quick tour of the new & noteworthy features introduced this year in Sirius 6; describe our general strategy for moving Sirius to the web while not breaking the existing modelers; present our plan for 2019 in terms of Sirius (and Obeo Designer) releases and major changes to expect, and the different ways you can participate in making this new phase of the Sirius project a success for you! The following talk by Stéphane will provide more details about the technical choices we've made for the web version of Sirius and the results of our experiments so far.

1. Pierre-Charles David
Sirius Project Lead
@_pcdavid | pierre-charles.david@obeo.fr
Sirius Roadmap
5th December, 2018

2. Agenda
1. What happened in 2018
2. Embracing the Web
3. What to expect in 2019

3. 2018

4. Two (mostly) parallel efforts
■ “Business as usual”
■ Two major versions
■ Several maintenance releases
■ The usual mix of bug fixes and new
features
■ First visible work on bringing Sirius to
the web
■ Several prototypes
■ Sirius headless server
■ Web-based “Workflow”
■ Web-based diagrams
■ Helped us validate different aspects of
our strategy

5. Sirius Releases in 2018
■ 2 major versions (6.0. & 6.1)
■ 6.0 in June with Eclipse Photon
■ 6.1 in October
■ 7 maintenance releases
■ 4.1.x, 5.1.x, 6.0.x, 6.1.x
■ triggered by clients with
Software Assurance
■ 213 tickets closed
■ 58 enhancements (27%)
■ 155 bug fixes

6. Sirius 6.x New & Noteworthy

7. Support for background color on diagrams
Sirius 6.0

8. New “magic” edge creation tool
Sirius 6.0

9. Quick navigation to service implementation
Sirius 6.0

10. Representation Links in Diagrams
Sirius 6.0

11. Integration with ELK for improved diagram
layouts
Sirius 6.0
Still experimental
Feedback welcome!
https://bit.ly/SiriusAndELK

12. Optional Table Header
Sirius 6.1

13. Optional Table Header
Sirius 6.1

14. More Powerful and Flexible Menu
Contributions
Sirius 6.1

15. Visibility Mode
Sirius 6.1

16. Availability
■ Sirius 6.1.1 is available
■ https://wiki.eclipse.org/Sirius/6.1.1
■ released on 2018-11-27
■ Obeo Designer CE 11.1.0
■ Ready-to-use package with Sirius & Ecore Tools
■ Only Free Software (commercial support available)
■ https://www.obeodesigner.com/

17. Community

18. First Sirius Community Survey
■ Published last October (SiriusCon 2017)
■ 15 questions
■ user types
■ satisfaction levels
■ priorities
■ Helped us adjust the roadmap
■ Will be reconducted this year

19. Community Events
■ SiriusDay Eindhoven
■ April, organized by Altran & Obeo
■ More than 60 attendees
■ EclipseCon France 2018
■ Toulouse, June
■ 4 talks by Obeo, 2 directly related to Sirius
■ Eclipse DemoCamp Eindhoven
■ July, organized and hosted by Altran
■ EclipseCon Europe 2018
■ Ludwigsburg, Germany, October
■ 3 talks by Obeo

20. Communication
■ 11 Sirius-related blog messages on blog.obeo.fr
■ Newsletters
■ twitter.com/eclipsesirius
■ Active forum (100+ messages/month)

21. Embracing
the Web

22. What we have today

23. What we want

24. Benefits
■ Ease of use for end-users
■ “point your browser to this URL and start working”
■ everyone is familiar with web idioms
■ Always up to date
■ Heavy workloads can be moved server-side
■ simulation, analysis, code/doc generation, etc.
■ handle huge models
■ enable organization-wide collaboration
■ Modern graphical and multimedia capabilities
■ huge ecosystem and investments

25. What our users want

26. What our users want

27. What our users want

28. Two flavors
■ “Classical” RCP-based Sirius
■ Web flavor as an alternative way
to use Sirius-based modelers
■ Based on the same core platform

29. Keep what makes Sirius great...
■ Modelers defined in high-level configuration files
■ the same .odesign files (with some caveats)
■ Dynamic, with no code generation, fast feedback for specifiers
■ the same feedback loop for testing the web version
■ Flexible even for complex models
■ configurable and extensible at every level
… and make it available in a browser.

30. Web-based Diagrams

31. Diagrams first, the rest will follow
■ The most used part of Sirius (by far)
■ Also the most challenging technically to port to the web
■ Other features will follow
■ properties view, tables, trees, etc.
■ Possibly web-exclusive features
■ ex: complex tables that would be too costly with SWT/Face
■ ex: dashboards, charts
■ Tell us about your needs!

32. Web-based Sirius Diagrams
Prototype
Technical details
in the next session

33. Make Sirius independent from
Eclipse platform

34. Modeling is much more than diagraming!
“Boxes and arrows”
Modeling platform
- domain models
- navigation
- storage
- consistency
- analysis & validation
- alternative representations
- code/doc generation
- etc.

35. Split the architecture
■ Progressively modularize the Sirius code base
■ Isolate dependencies : Eclipse UI, GMF Runtime, Eclipse Workspace...
■ Keep the system working at all time
■ Split core business code from rendering technologies
■ Core deployable in headless (web) server
■ Exposes services through well-defined API & protocols

36. From this...

37. ...to this

38. Modernizing the Sirius code base
■ Great opportunity to modernize the existing code base
■ we’ve learned a lot in 11 years!
■ benefit for both RCP and web flavors
■ Modularization
■ isolate clean sub-systems and refactor them
to be platform-independent
■ Modernization
■ time to rethink some older decisions
■ get rid of some cruft

39. Interoperability between flavors
■ Development server can be run from inside Eclipse
■ enables the fast feedback loop
■ test your modeler’s compatibility with the web flavor
■ Deployment: reuse your odesign plug-in server-side
■ not all features will be supported in the first versions
■ Usage: semantic model portability between the two flavors
■ not for aird files
■ As always, guaranteed backward compatibility of models
■ automatic migration
Domain models
odesign files
aird files

40. Open Core
■ Contribute architecture changes to existing Eclipse Sirius project
■ new components and updates to the core, shared platform
■ Through the Eclipse community & release train
■ As today some components will be proprietary licensed
■ enterprise-level features

41. What to expect
in 2019

42. Priorities
■ Top priority: production-ready web-based diagrams
■ in parallel, modernize Sirius core as needed
■ No other major new features planned for 2019
■ Possible exceptions
■ developments sponsored by clients (i.e. you)
■ integration of externally developed features
■ new capabilities as side-effects of the
modularization/modernisation effort

43. More frequent releases
■ Current rhythm
■ one major X.0 release in June, for the yearly Eclipse SimRel
■ one minor X.1 (“LTS”) release in October/November
■ New rhythm
■ one new release in February: every 4 months
■ Early Access milestones between releases
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
Release EAP Release EAP Release EAP
2 months 4 months

44. Early Access Program
■ Make it easier for early adopters to test Sirius milestones and give us feedback
■ Complete Obeo Designer CE packages
■ include milestone versions of Sirius
■ no maintenance or commercial support
■ Published deprecation & removal policy for breaking changes
■ different API tiers with different rules
■ Test them!
■ tell us of unforeseen impact as soon as possible

45. More Communication
■ Publish release calendar and roadmap
■ Communicate on features maturity and changes of plan
■ Publish deprecation & removal policy
■ general rules and the concrete items
■ We need to hear back from you
twitter.com/eclipsesirius linkedin.com/company/obeo
blog.obeo.fr
sirius-dev@eclipse.org
contact@obeo.fr

46. How to participate
■ Tell us about your concrete use cases
■ help to prioritize features
■ Feedback on EAP milestones
■ for both RCP and Web flavors
■ Sponsoring
■ the best way to make sure that special
feature you need will get included!

47. Takeaways
■ 2018 was for experimenting various approaches and web-based technologies
■ we can now move forward more confidently
■ 2019: top-level priority on production-ready Sirius diagrams on the web
■ opportunity to rethink some parts of the Sirius Core platform
■ To support this:
■ more communication on the roadmap and current state
■ more frequent releases with EAP
■ How to help:
■ test EAP milestones and give us feedback
■ tell us about your needs and concrete use cases to help prioritize features
■ sponsor the features that are important to you

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Modeling Tools Go Up to The Cloud
Thanks for listening to Pierre-Charles David (Obeo)
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