At the last EclipseCon Europe, my collegue, István Ráth presented our incremental model query approach in the Modeling Symposium. Since then, we are working hard to evaluate further uses of the technology while creating a better tooling support for the specification of those queries.
This year, during the OMG/Eclipse workshop a day before EclipseCon 2012 István will present our approach together with our new results:
14:35 – 15:00
High performance queries and their novel applications
István Ráth- Research Associate, BME
High-performance model queries are still a major challenge for the industry standard Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), they are intensively used in various model validation, model transformation or code generation scenarios. Existing EMF-based query technologies (like Eclipse OCL, EMF Model Query 1-2, or native Java programs) can have significant scalability issues for complex queries of models over 50-100000 model elements. Moreover, it is often tedious and time consuming to efficiently implement EMF-based queries manually on a case-by-case basis.
Recent initiatives, such as the EMF-IncQuery framework (http://viatra.inf.mit.bme.hu/incquery) have proposed innovative algorithms to mitigate this issue. EMF-IncQuery uses a graph query language, and provides incremental query evaluation by caching the results of the model queries and incrementally maintaining the cache when the underlying EMF model changes. Furthermore, the EMF-IncQuery framework can be easily integrated into existing EMF-based applications in a non-intrusive way.
In the first part of the talk, we overview the results of a thorough benchmark comparison
intended to aid software engineers in picking the best tool for a given purpose. The measurements involve several versions of Eclipse OCL, manually optimized Java code, dedicated academic query and well-formedness checking tools and EMF-IncQuery and highlight the most important practical considerations of queries in model-driven tool design.In the second part of the talk, we briefly overview novel and innovative uses of high performance queries such design-space exploration, whereby traditional modeling is augmented with AI techniques to aid the (semi-automatic) optimization of model-based software designs.
If you are interested in modeling techniques, I recommend attending to the talk. As a teaser, I show now an existing application of such AI-based techniques: an automated quick fix generation for domain-specific modeling languages. We already presented this technique, albeit based on the VIATRA2 transformation framework in VL/HCC 2011. The article, together with a video demonstration is available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2011.6070373
For interest, the video demonstration is also uploaded to Youtube for easier watching. (UPDATE: For feed readers the video url is the following: http://youtu.be/kPc4x01K7-s).
