EMF Compare 2.0 on the launching pad!

This year has been a really important one for us at Obeo to think about our current products and how to improve them. Eclipse Juno was a big investment for us, with a lot of modeling projects in the release train : Acceleo, EMF Compare, EEF, ATL, Mylyn Intent...

EMF Compare is the one that got us thinking the most, and we ended up developping two versions in parallel during the development phase of Juno. First is the version we actually included in the release train, 1.3.1, which is now the maintenance stream.

This version includes a number of new developments and enhancements. Most notably, the detection and merging of differences on values ordering has been greatly improved, and the merging in general was one of our major endeavors this year, fixing thousands of corner cases. Please refer to the release highlights for the noteworthy changes of this version.

However, the 6 years of development spent on EMF Compare allowed us to identify a number of limitations in the architecture and overall design of the project, most of which cannot be worked around or re-designed without breaking the core of the comparison engine. We needed a complete overhaul of the project, and thus the second version we've been developping through the past year is the 2.0.0.

Version 2 has been started as part of the work sponsored in the context of the Modeling Platform Working Group. Its two main objectives are to :

• lift the architectural and technical limitations of EMF Compare so that we can reduce its memory footprint while improving its overall performance, and
• simplify the API we offer to our adopters so that launching comparisons or exploiting the difference model can be done more effectively.

We're also taking this opportunity to further our integration with the "standard" Eclipse Compare UI, making sure to use the Eclipse Compare UI everywhere we can. This means that the icon decorators will now properly show exactly as they would with text comparisons, the behavior when switching viewers on selection is now closer to what Eclipse Compare does...

Version 2.0.0 of EMF Compare will be out in the first half of august. It focuses on the comparison of models presenting IDs of some sort (XMI ID, technical ID, ...). The design and architecture have both been remasterized with all the experience accumulated on the 1.* stream, greatly improving the user experience, performance, memory footprint and reusability of the tool. We've submitted a talk for Eclipse con Europe 2012 focussing on the intended improvements of this version. Do not hesitate to comment there if you're interested in it!

Version 2.1.0 is scheduled shortly after that, sometime during september. That new version will leverage the new architecture to provide the scalability improvements mandatory for very large model comparisons. In short, EMF Compare will be able to function with time and memory footprints dependent on the number of actual differences instead of being dependent on the input models' size.