Graphical Modeling Framework

I’ve been playing on and off with the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) for a few months. I am by no means an expert, but I’m coming along. Over the past week or so, I’ve been playing with the the 2.0M3 milestone build (I see that 2.0M4 is out today). Setting up your environment to work with the milestone build is a little mindnumbing, as it prereqs several other projects’ work that must be manually assembled, but that little problem will disappear when the Europa update site is up and running (besides, the prereqs are pretty clearly laid out and it’s not all that hard to bring it all together).

I’ve cobbled together a little demonstration of GMF in action. I’ve built a very simple graphical editor that lets you assemble an orgchart. The implementation is very simple (complex things are hard to demo) and so only gives a small taste of what you can build if you have about four minutes on your hands. It actually took me a little less than four minutes to assemble the first pass of the application; I then go back and tweak it a bit which brings the length of the demonstration to about 7½ minutes.

The demonstration uses the GMF Dashboard which is pretty cool. To be honest, I’m not sure that I’d use it much after the first couple of tries, but it does reduce the total number of mouse clicks which is nice. It should be pretty clear as you watch the demonstration that GMF is designed for far more sophisticated use. Where possible, I’m doing the simplest possible thing and accepting defaults. You can do a lot more with it, but that’s something that I’ll save for a later time (besides, I’m only a beginner with GMF myself).

I can’t say that using GMF is dirt simple, but I don’t believe that it’s intended to be. However, after only a short amount of browsing, you can start building some pretty amazing things.

If you missed the link above, you can access the demonstration by clicking here.