I was cleaning up my ${HOME} folder today and found a set of demos I prepared two years ago.
I did this for a modeling course given at Polytech’. The course was about Model Driven Engineering; toward the end the students have to build a domain-specific model for textual adventure games and then generate the corresponding Java app. Some students tend to go very far on this exercise, building a fairly complex DSL.
The following demos are here to give an idea to the students of what can be done in a few minutes: a simple Ecore model
And then a graphical modeler:
And then we build Acceleo generator templates to directly map a game instance into its running Java code. It’s a very interesting exercise; students stay focused because it’s about a game, and at the same time it’s a great example of the power of specific modeling. You don’t design a game with a UML diagram, but building your own language and using it you’re quickly getting results and can evaluate many designs.
Building the complete tooling is a matter of minutes, not hours. Here are the live demos:
As a sidenote, these flash demos are based on a pretty old version of Obeo Designer — if you’re interested, have a look at the latest versions which are even better!