New and Noteworthy for openArchitectureWare 4.3

openArchitectureWare 4.3 is mainly a bugfix release. We've fixed 102 bugs with a lot of help by active community members. Special thanks go to Michael Clay and Manfred Klug for providing a lot of patches and feedback.

In addition to the bug fixes we introduced two new components: A generic editor, which can be used to edit and validate dynamic EMF models without any need for using EMF's generator or installing DSL-specific editors into the workbench. The other component is an Adapter to EMF's Validation Framework, which makes the old GMF adapter obsolete.

The list of bugs fixed during the last release can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/47mucl

Xtext

A migration guide for migrating Xtext 4.2 projects to Xtext 4.3 projects can be found in the Xtext reference documentation.

EMF resource

An implementation to EMF's resource API is generated from the grammar. This enables referencing Xtext models from other EMF models as well as referencing arbitrary EMF models from Xtext based models.

URI token

Import mechanisms can be implemented into your DSL using the new URI token. See the documentation on how to use it.

Viewpoints

It is now possible to add additional "viewpoints" to the outline view (e.g. type hierarchy, call hierarchy, etc.)

Font styles

Syntax coloring can be defined based on the model's state.

Configure Xtext parsing

Xtext syntax parsing can be controlled using the platform preferences:

Experimental Features

The next two features are marked experimental because they are a bit tricky to use and thus their API is likely to change in the future.

Use existing meta models

If you already have an existing meta model it is now possible to define a textual syntax for it.

Import grammars

This is basically an include mechanism for grammars. It is possible to import an existing grammar and overwrite some rules in it.