Concerning the editing and
diagraming support changes are more subtles though powerful.
Here is a quick glimpse on the latest milestone :
The most visible change is the work on the diagram ergonomy, the user interface has been cleanup, streamlined and features are more accessible. The global toolbar has been replaced with a dedicated toolbar embedded in the diagram editor providing access
to the filters and
the enablement of
layers.
The contextual actions have been re-organized too.
If you're used to nice Eclipse editors
you'll be happy to learn that the "Quick Outline"
(summoned thanks to CTRL+O) is available in
the diagrams now.
Just type in any word here, and the corresponding
model element will be revealed in your
diagram.
More interesting is the redesigned support for diagrams ! You can, for
any kind of model being UML or
your own DSL, specify and leverage a diagram editor
keeping the model
sequence order in sync with
the diagram ordering.
you have the same
level of customization that for the other kind of
diagrams, you can
change the shapes, colors and use the sequence diagram constructions like lifelines, messages and executions.
Here we're not using UML but our own
"interactions" DSL which refers to another DSL describing domain entities.
As a sidenote, you can now have a color definition
which is interpolated on a color palette depending on some model
computation. Here we have a nice
shade of green depending on the
level of execution.
In a nutshell this new release will bring you more control, to the visual aspect and interactions on the tooling,
the ability to define sequence diagrams, still
keeping the complexity to a minimum : no deployement requirement, one
file describes the whole design
environment which you can test and try without
even starting an Eclipse runtime.
It doesn't mean
you can't deploy
your environment as a set of plugins with proper dependency checking thanks
to P2, it's just that you don't have
too.
If you don't know about
Obeo Designer and you want to setup a dedicated design + transformation toolchain for your domain, have a look here.
Here is a flash demo being a recap of these features :