ViewModel is a view transformation approach with (1) a fully compositional transformation language built on top of the VIATRA Query language, and (2) a transformation engine which is reactive, incremental, validating and inconsistency-tolerant at the same time. For more information see the publication page of our recently submitted paper.
ViewModel is available as an Eclipse plugin from our update site (go to Help > Install New Software... in Eclipse and enter the following URI):
http://docs.inf.mit.bme.hu/viewmodel/repository
The ViewModel Runtime feature is required for executing transformations, while the ViewModel SDK feature contains editor support and code generator for the transformation language. See the implementation of the benchmarks for usage.
View specification classes are generated from .viewmodel files, which should be located in the source folder of an Eclipse plug-in project.
The bundle hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.runtime.transformation should be added to the set of plug-in dependencies.
The helper class hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.runtime.transformation.ViewModel provides easy execution of transformations:
// MyGeneratedView is the view specification class generated from MyGeneratedView.viewmodel
val viewModel = ViewModel.create(resource, MyGeneratedView.createSpecification)
viewModel.startUnscheduledExecution
val results = viewModel.results
// Modify `resource` here to get `results` updated automaticaly.
viewModel.dispose
As there is currently no support for running from a plain JAR / Maven application, an Eclipse application or plug-in test should be used.
The ViewModel plugin and its benchmarks were build and tested with Java 1.8.0. It may be possible to develop or run them with Java 9 or 10, however, we recommend Java 1.8.0 instead.
A set of benchmarks were prepared for ViewModel and imperative reactive VIATRA transformations. Our results are available at the publication page.
The benchmarks are packaged as an Eclipse application (see the instructions below for building).
linux gtk x86_64: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ylac7r4iyv0gd01/hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.benchmarks.product-linux.gtk.x86_64.zip?dl=1macosx cocoa x86_64: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cd81j7w23yhgxyb/hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.benchmarks.product-macosx.cocoa.x86_64.zip?dl=1win32 win32 x86_64: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vem1xi5a6xp5yyf/hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.benchmarks.product-win32.win32.x86_64.zip?dl=1
The archives contain the Eclipse application, example models, and .json configuration files for various transformation cases and model modification mixes. Execute the benchmark with
./eclipse -benchmarks <CONFIGURATION FILE>.json -vmargs -Xmx15g
By default, the benchmark configurations d_batch.json, d_NN.json (NN = 01..15), vs_batch.json and d_NN.json will output benchmarks results to /mnt/results. This enables mounting a shared filesystem at that path to collects logs from multiple machines.
For running the benchmarks in Amazon EC2 (we used m5.xlarge instances with Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09.1), some utility scripts are provided in /benchmarks/scripts which aid in setting up the measurement environment.
For trying out the benchmarking environment in a more limited environment, you can use the short.json configuration, which does not depend on a mounted shared filesystem, and runs only a few experiments.
The R Markdown files benchmarks/R/viewmodel-data-analysis/viewmodel-data-analysis-results.Rmd and benchmarks/R/viewmodel-data-analysis/viewmodel-data-analysis-results-short.Rmd may be knitted to generate reports from the full_log.csv and short_log.csv files, respectively. They were tested under R 3.5.0 and RStudio 1.1.453 (Arch Linux), as well as R 3.4.4 and RStudio 1.1.442 (Ubuntu 18.04) with tidyverse 1.2.1 and knitr 1.20.
The ViewModel benchmarks contain several large example models taken from the Train Benchmark, which were modified for compatiblity with some tools used in the benchmark, such as eMoflon. Hence these models were added to the repository. Unfortunately, their size neccessitated the use of Git LFS (Large File Storage).
To clone the repository with large files, first install Git LFS to get started. Then you can clone the repository with the command
git lfs clone https://github.com/FTSRG/viewmodel
If you do not need the example models, simply cloning with git clone will also suffice.
This project uses Eclipse Tycho to automate compilation and packaging.
Build the project from scratch using the command
mvn clean package
Upon successful build, a p2 update site is output to /releng/hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.repository/target/repository.
Later, you may pass the options -DskipViatraGenerator and -DskipXtextGenerator to skip generating rarely changing artifacts from scratch (don't forget to run the generator when appropriate!).
To also build the benchmarking Eclipse application, use
mvn clean package -DcompileBenchmarks
instead. This may take significantly longer due to the increased number of dependencies. Upon successful build, product archives are output to /benchmarks/releng/hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.benchmarks.repository/target/products.
To develop ViewModel with Eclipse (version Oxygen.2 recommended), you should first install the following Eclipse plugins:
- Xtext SDK 2.13.0
- VIATRA Query and Transformation SDK 1.7.2
After installing the required plugins, the Eclipse projects inside the repository (except the projects in the benchmarks/) folder can be imported into Eclipse.
You should set hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.target as the target platform to build ViewModel and start a runtime Eclipse instance to develop your view transformations.
To develop and run the benchmarks, additional preparation is needed. First make sure to import the projects
- hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.benchmarks.target
- hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.benchmarks.models
into your host Eclipse. Set hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.benchmarks.target as the target platform, which will also provision via p2 some additional transformations tools for use in the benchmarks. Start a runtime Eclipse instance and import the rest of the projects from the benchmarks/ directory. The benchmarks application hu.bme.mit.inf.viewmodel.benchmarks.application.ViewModelBenchmarks an be executed from within Eclipse (as an Eclipse application run configuration). Do not forget to set the working directory and pass command line arguments to the run configuration as needed.
The project uses the Eclipse Public License 1.0. For more information see NOTICE.md and CONTRIBUTORS.md.
The project was partially supported by the MTA-BME Lendület Cyber-Physical Systems Research Group and the Fault Tolerant Systems Research Group of the Department of Measurement and Information Systems, Budapest University of Technology and Economics.