How to improve your forecasts using ATL

In order to extend the Eclipse World Cup 2010 application with other modeling tools, I made a simple ATL transformation which helps football ignorants like me to improve their results...

The ATL refining mode allow to modify an EMF resource in-place, by defining a minimal set of transformation rules. It is also possible to query informations from an input model.

So I created the ATL module below, which updates a given forecast model - mine - by copying forecasts from another player - better than me :-) .

The following screenshot shows my updated model, improved with the new results:

Anyway, I didn't have to use that cheat as my initial forecasts were not bad at all !

Related Links :

• The game: An RCP application created with EEF.
• Acceleo add-in: An Acceleo code generator to export the results in an HTML page.
• EMF Compare add-in : An action to compare your own forecasts with the best ones.

New ATL homepage

The ATL homepage now makes use of the template provided by Heiko Behrens

Here is the new appearance:

I hope this will make ATL resources lookup easier !

ATL Presentations Slides

Now ATL presentations are available on slideshare. Below are the EclipseCon 2008 & 2009 tutorials:

http://www.slideshare.net/wpiers/modelt-to-model-transformation-withatl

http://www.slideshare.net/wpiers/model-refactoring-with-atl

And a short presentation of the ATL Industrialization project given during the mtATL2009 workshop:

http://www.slideshare.net/wpiers/atl-industrialization

ATL Ouput patterns enhancement

A miss in the ATL syntax has just been corrected: the in keyword is now available for both input and output patterns. This enhancement will be available in ATL 3.1.

It mainly allow to specify in which model you want to create elements, when the old semantics forbade the use of several output models conforming to the same metamodel declaration. The workaround wasn't very intuitive as it consists on declaring the same metamodel with different names...

The use of this keyword is described at the end of this section.

ATL Editor enhancements

ATL 3.1 will bring major enhancements, especially in the ATL source files editor. Here is a quick overview of the new features:

Hover informations

Open declaration (both available with F3 and Ctrl-click)

And finally, the long-awaited advanced content assist... now working at any level on OCL expressions and enhanced with code templates

At this time you can test those new features using latest ATL CVS (HEAD branch) source code.

ATL plug-ins

ATL 3.1 will provide a new feature which help to achieve ATL programmatic launch: the ATL plugin wizard. This utility first will ask you for transformation parameters (metamodels, libraries paths, transformation modules paths), like below:

Then a new plug-in will be generated, embedding:

• the transformation modules and libraries
• a propery file containing URIs, atl file paths
• a Java class which allow to programmatically launch the ATL transformation

Finally you will be able to launch the transformation using the generated main, or integrating the launcher class into an existing application.

You can test this new wizard using the last 3.1 Milestone build.

ATL Galileo Release

ATL 3.0.0 has just been successfully released, and introduce a lot of improvements at both UI and API level. Consult the News and Noteworthy page for more details.