EMF Forms and EMF Client Platform 1.9.0 released!

We are happy to announce that together with Neon, we have released EMF Forms and EMF Client Platform 1.9.0! We want to thank all committers and contributors for their work as well as the active ecosystem of users and adopters for the feedback and support!

EMF Forms is a framework focused on the creation of form-based UIs. EMF Client Platform is designed to support the development of applications based on an EMF data model. If you are not yet familiar with EMF Forms, please refer to this tutorial for a introduction.

Both frameworks are part of Eclipse Modeling Tools Neon, but you can also find the new release on our download pages:

• Download EMF Client Platform
• Download EMF Forms

Both projects have been amazing successes since their inception over 5 years ago. We are proud of having a continuously active team of 15 contributors:

We also would like to thank all of our customers and sponsors for making this success possible. EMF Forms and ECP are great examples, that business models based on open source work well and that open source can continuously save costs. The contributions and sponsoring of the last years have created an incredible value, which is successfully used by many projects for their benefit. At the same time the costs have been shared among many contributors. If you believe in code stats, we are close to total costs of 9 Million Dollar (see below). However non of the existing contributor or sponsor has accounted for more than a small fraction of this.

It is also amazing to see, that EMF Forms and ECP are used in a huge variety of application domains from engineering over e-commerce to finance, from high technology vendors to sailing associations. While the managed data is completely different in those domains, the cross-cutting requirements are often shared. This is part of the success of sharing the code. Especially in the last months, we often had very similar feature requests from completely different domains, sometimes literally within a week. If every contributor or sponsor takes over a small piece, they benefit from all the other pieces, which are already there.

So what is next? You might have noticed, that we have started on a new renderer for EMF Forms based on a native web stack called JSON Forms. We see it as the optimal complement for EMF Forms and hope to make the idea of declarative UI development even more attractive. We are amazed by the progress of JSON Forms and we will soon start a blog series to introduce it more in detail. However, as you can see in the EMF Forms / ECP repository, we have not in anyway reduced our effort for the existing frameworks and do not have any plans to do so.

As always, we will also blog about new features of the EMF Forms / ECP1.9.0 release in the upcoming weeks! Please follow this blog or follow us on twitter to get notified about the new posts.