Eclipse Modeling Project Refinements, Eclipse Galileo Feature #7

The next feature on the Top 10 Galileo Features (according to me) comes from the Eclipse Modeling Project. The Eclipse Modeling Project is arguably one of the most diverse, yet well focused, top level projects at Eclipse.

Number 7 on my list is the EMF UltraThin Diet. In January, the EMF team changed the way a number of fields and lists were generated. Since there are lots of overlap between classes in a hierarchy, and not all the allocated fields are ever used, the EMF UltraThin Diet enables a lazy memory allocation technique and combines many of the duplicated fields. Some estimates reduce the fields in an EObject from 120 Bytes to 12 Bytes!

While the details of this feature are interesting, the way in which one change can impact so many projects demonstrates the power of Eclipse. Many projects on the Galileo release train are built on-top of EMF, and this change will positively impact all downstream projects.  Beyond Eclipse, all users of EMF can apply this diet to their models too.

Ed Merks (with help from Dave Steinberg) get the kudos for this feature. You guys rock!!!

In addition to this change, there are number of exciting things happening in the modeling world. The XText project – A modeling project for creating domain specific languages, parsers, AST-Meta-models and an editor, from a simple EBNF grammar – is one of the most innovative projects in my mind. Also, the integration between Teneo and EclipseLink was one of the highlights of EclipseCon!

Thanks to the entire Eclipse Modeling Project!