Easy Living (with Obeo Designer)

This isn't about a new song by Billie Holiday rather, this is about fast (but well) crafting of diagram and model editors.

What first comes to mind when thinking about modeling is  drawing boxes and edges between boxes. Although this simplistic view is far from the essence of modeling the ability of drawing diagrams stays an essential part of it. It is especially important when one wants to develop domain specific models with graphical editors that allow non MDA specialists to actually edit models without having to delve into the gory details of meta-models and tree-view editors. As an example, I've been working on a process editor for the BPMN2.0 meta-model lately. Here are two pictures : the tree view of the process model and the Process Viewpoint I developed with OD5:

Tree View Editor

Process Diagram Editor

I started to work with ObeoDesigner and the development of viewpoints on models couples of days ago and I keep being amazed seeing how easy it was to develop this simple BPMN2.0 process editor. I think it only took me a couple of days starting with the bpmn2.0 EMF meta-model
This modeler allows to edit processes by direct creation of process elements and includes  Pools and Lanes. It also allows dragging elements between lanes which took me 5 minutes to implement.