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.

Should we wish a bad new year to our enemies ?

First, it would change from wishing a happy new year, and it would also avoid posting yet another best wishes message to people we don't really know who they are and what they need for 2006, even if we like them. For instance, does posting an "happy new year" message to this blog make sens ? (who read this blog ?)

The idea has come from my CEO who has responded this way to many traditional impersonal greetings emails he received for the new year:

Nothing is easier than sending an email message or a SMS to the whole address book, or sending a post to a blog, wishing everybody a very happy new year 2006 for them and their family. To who ? Which family ? What's about the person who have no concubine and no parents because they've just died last december... ?

What's the sense for such a message if we don't really know the person who will receive it ? and if we don't personalize our message and produce an effort to make it ? What will be the sens for this action for the rising generation which is accommodated to the easy broadcast communication mode ?

Wishing a bad new year to all our enemies is quite easier ! As they are enemies, we don't have any time to spend to personalize any wishes. Maybe, for a "good" enemy, we should take time to make a strong message... But in this case, we might prefer spending time to write dedicated messages to our friends.

Based on this reflexion, I'm trying to make dedicated wishes to my friends, wishing them for 2006 something personal and different for each of them.