A new edition of this title is available, ISBN-10: 0321331885 ISBN-13: 9780321331885

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 6 Ratings

Significant Productivity Gains - 2003-09-21
Reviewer Rating:
If you have used Eclipse to program Java, you might have gotten comfortable with its capabilities. Very intuitive and kindly donated by IBM to open source. So when I opened this book, I anticipated oodles of helpful tweaks and shortcuts.

But not so. IBM has indeed provided these in the book. But their goals were far more ambitious. The Eclipse Modelling Framework is a serious effort to incorporate into a development environment java, XML and UML. They found, perhaps correctly, that most Java programmers, including, and maybe especially the experienced ones, don't really use UML much. Okay, as an afterthought, to document a code base upon a major release. But rarely as a starting point. So one intent is to seamlessly let java programmers incorporate UML. More strongly, they claim that EMF lets you define a model in any of java, XML or UML. Then simply clicking a button will make EMF generate the other 2 forms. The greatest payoff for this is that it lets programmers, who may not be fluent in UML, make a graphical UML model and thence have EMF make the java code stubs. Much less error prone than doing it manually.

There is an analogy here with Spice, if any of you have an electrical engineering background. Until the late 80s, if you wanted to model a circuit in Spice, you typically drew it by hand on paper. Then you manually transcribed these into a text file of netlists that was input into Spice. Slow and very error prone. Then along came MicroSim, Carver Mead's Magic program and others, that let you construct a circuit diagram on a console, and from which you could press a button and a Spice input file would be made. Much more productive.

The book offers a similar gain in productivity. All you are asked to risk is your time in understanding the book.

Good book but also read www.eclipse.org articles - 2003-09-11
Reviewer Rating:
First four chapters of this book are an excellent introduction to EMF. Last section of this book wastes too many pages by listing reference APIs. I would highly recommend that you read equally important EMF overview documents available on the www.eclipse.org site before you buy this book.

Best and Only Book on EMF - 2003-12-14
Reviewer Rating:
This is the best and only work on the Eclipse Modeling Framework, which is the code generation engine built into the Eclipse IDE. It's a solid work, but it's one flaw is that it is neither a completely how-to book, nor is it completely architectural work, so it will probably frustrate most readers to some degree. This is the only reason I didn't give it a perfect rating.

Not introductory as I expected - 2004-03-29
Reviewer Rating:
This book served as my introduction to Eclipse, and I found it not as helpful as just playing with Eclipse itself. After play time was over, I went to the book again, and saw some improvements that I could have used.

I don't mean to say that the book is bad. It's a little overweight with Java references, true, but it still covers one of the best Java IDEs available, and the fact that it's better than many commercial IDEs just makes it more pleasing.

I believe I got this book when I wasn't ready for it, or when I wasn't the main target audience, and that this may skew my perception of it. In any sense, the book just wasn't my piece of pie, but I can see it being someone elses.

Google - 2008-02-09
Reviewer Rating:
Just go to google and you will get all of the information in this book.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Programming

Sub-Categories:
Programming > Java