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Acceleo 2.0.0 - New and Noteworthy

Acceleo 2 is coming! This release brings in many changes, always aiming at a pragmatic and efficient use of model driven engineering.

The Acceleo project now hosts a set of open-source generators targeting many great technologies such as JEE, CSharp, Php but also Python.

Acceleo can now to directly have selection predicates without using the select(..) service. Predicates are enclosed with brackets [..] in a similar way of XPath.

Figure :Filtering with Acceleo 1

Figure :Filtering with Acceleo 2

In order to explicit some cases where scripts/services/metamodel elements have the same name, an optional prefix is now available.

It may be either one the followings : script, metamodel or service.

Figure :Using the prefix service

Standard java services may now become deprecated.

Figure :Deprecated services

The current service may now be given parameters in order to navigate in the transformation execution tree. This solves a frequent use case in an elegant way.

Figure :Using current( value)

Figure :Generated code

The system services have been refactored in order to get a better consistancy than before, it causes a number of them to become deprecated:

• cast() who had the same behavior than filter()
• nPut() replaced by put()
• nGet() replaced by get()
• nPop() replaced by pop()
• nPeek() replaced by peek()
• minimize() replaced by nMinimize()
• sort() replaced by nSort()
• until()
• sepStr()
• select() and delete() replaced by the predicates [..]

The general rule is that services on lists or collections now have a name starting withn.

Forward compatibility is guaranteed, services are marked as deprecated but will only be dropped for the next major version : Acceleo 3.

A few new services :

• nReverse() reverses a list
• adapt("..") converts anything to an Acceleo primitive type, the parameter can be one of :"String", "int", "boolean", "double", "List", "EObject", "ENode" or "ENodeList".
• nGet() may now have two parameters in order to get a sublist from a list

Acceleo had many core changes, yet user experience has still been improved, especially with keyboard shortcuts:

• F5 : reloads a template in the reflective editor.
• F3 : opens a script definition in the template editor.
• CTRL+MAJ+C : comments/uncomments a bloc in the template editor.

Templates compilation time has been greatly reduced.

Completion assistant is now case-insensitive.

Figure :Case-insensitive completion

Thanks to the XSD component Acceleo may directly use XML files and generate text from it.

Figure :Generating from an XML file

The .chain files used to setup and launch a generation have evolved in order to provide new possibilities:

Figure :.chain file evolutions

More specifically :

• One may now specify a set of models using the ModelSet element. This is really useful when one wants to generate text from many XML files.
• A new attribute chainPath in the sub-chains call. Using this attribute the called chain may be stored in the workspace or in the runtime as a plugin.
• One may now use custom actions called during the generation process (for instance to zip a set of files or to launch a deployement ...)
• A new file type : CustomFile used as parameter for CustomActions

Acceleo generators projects may now be deployed as Eclipse Plug-In. This means it's now possible to manage dependencies and update Acceleo modules the same way Eclipse does for Plug-Ins - using the update manager.

Figure :Export generator project as plugin

Figure :Calling a .chain file stored in a plugin

With a few settings Acceleo is now able to initialize a generation project for a given target.

Figure :Choosing a generation module

Figure :Generation module parameters

A lot of work has been done on performances, the generation process has been fastened by at least 30%

Acceleo 2.0.0 fix a few bugs :