Topcased: an Eclipse open source MDA toolkit

Toulouse is known to be the home base of the European aerospace industry.

Many big industries located here build critical systems and software with a long life cycle of development and maintenance. During the last 20 years, they all have developped/used methodologies to enhance the quality of the software they made. They have joined up with the MDA process use, even if they use different models depending on technical fields (UML, HOOD, AADL, etc.). In this process, designing is the main phase of a project, as the code, tests and documentation are generated from that model.

As these companies don't sell software but planes or satellites, it is natural they all want join efforts to develop methods and tools for critical software development.
An Airbus departement in charge of methods and tools has made an important step forward and has proposed to start an opensource project to develop a toolkit for critical software development. Others industries (not necessarily located near Toulouse or in France) are welcome to use and/or participate to the project.

The Topcased project has been created in 2004 with the most important industries involved in aerospace fields.

Anyware Technologies who has joined the project in 2004 as Eclipse platform expert and a specialist of opensource projects (Anyware Technologies is involved in projects of Apache and Eclipse foundations), is the architect of the platform.

Technically, the project is based on Eclipse platform and concepts. It uses GEF and EMF Eclipse's subprojects, and generates model editors from the meta-model of languages like UML. These meta-models are written using eCore, a subset of MOF model, provided by EMF.
Topcased is also called to be bridged to GMF and EMFT Eclipse's subprojects.

Topcased is also part of Aerospace Valley "pôle de competitivité" french regional project that is to be financed (in part) by the french government (actually, no money has been received yet since the government acceptance last year, but the hope is still here). Topcased is one of the most active projects of "pôles de compétitivité".

Today, Topcased provides the following fully usabled graphical modeling editors : eCore (meta-modeling of languages), ULM2 for classes, use-cases and states diagrams, SAM (automaton model).

Topcased download, GForge and mailing lists can be found here.