Sysiphus goes Eclipse

Sysiphus goes Eclipse?? Who or what is Sysiphus? What is Eclipse - isn´t that a Java-IDE? How do they fit? How can I participate?

What is Sysiphus?

Sysiphus is a suite of tools for developing and collaborating over software engineering models. In software engineering projects, different models are needed to support the activities of different participants. For example, requirements can be written in terms of a use case model and nonfunctional requirements. The detailed design of a component can be represented in terms of a class model.

Models allow participants to reason about the system using a simplified abstraction. In any realistic project, however, models themselves can become complex and difficult to maintain, as they change and overlap, diverting increasingly large project resources towards documentation and model maintenance. Even worse different models are often maintained in different tools resulting in information duplication and finally in information inconsistency.

The key idea of Sysiphus is the integration of many software engineering models into one unified model, represented within one repository. This repository can then be browsed with different editors for visualization of the artifacts, such as UML diagrams or work items.

What is Eclipse?

This is what eclipse.org says about the Eclipse platform: "The Eclipse Platform provides the core frameworks and services upon which all plug-in extensions are created. It also provides the runtime in which plug-ins are loaded, integrated, and executed. The primary purpose of the Platform is to enable other tool developers to easily build and deliver integrated tools."

So the Eclipse platform is much more than a Java-IDE. The Eclipse platform is the foundation of many also commercial products, such as IBM Rational Software Architect, including the famous Java-IDE.

How do they fit? What is Sysiphus goes Eclipse about?

In the Sysiphus Project many technologies had to be developed and now have to be maintained, that are not part of the core concepts and features but are rather infrastructure. With Eclipse emerging as a platform and offering almost all of these infrastructural technologies today it is an evident next step to build Sysiphus based on the Eclipse platform. In this project we will design and implement a new version of Sysiphus based on Eclipse. The new version of Sysiphus is called unicase. A Wiki and Blog of unicase is available on unicase.org.

Why should I participate?

• Work on a real project and solve a real problem - no more toy projects that will be dumped later on
• Get in touch with state-of-the-art technologies: Eclipse RCP, EMF, GMF, JAX-WS, Teneo, Hibernate, SWT, Maven, OSGi...
• Participate in on-going Software Engineering research

How can I participate?

You can be part of a team of students, doctoral candidates, researchers and industrial partners collaborating to build Sysiphus based on Eclipse. Your participation can be:

• Bachelor/Master/Dipoma Thesis
• Project Systementwicklung
• ...

Possible topics can be:

• Model-based configuration management
• Project management plugin
• Traceability visualization
• Mylyn integration
• Universal model draw pane
• ...
• Your own idea?

Contact

For a range of possible topics and collaboration modes please do not hesitate to contact us:

Jonas Helming

Maximilian Kögel

Technology Stack

• Java 6 SE
• Eclipse RCP
• EMF - Eclipse Modeling Framework
• GMF - Graphical Modeling Framework
• Teneo & Hibernate
• JAX-WS - Java API for XML Web Services
• OSGi
• Maven