Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help of many great people, especially because its contents are based almost exclusively on the work of others. I have worked over the years with a number of terrific people, but this book all started with a team of exceptional developers that comprised the initial Borland contingent of the GMF project: Artem Tikhomirov, Alexander “Vano” Shatalin, Boris Blajer, Dmitry Stadnik, Max Feldman, Michael “Upstairs” Golubev, and Radek Dvorak. Our small team led the way into the world of Eclipse contribution from Borland, thanks to the support of our management at the time, Raaj Shinde and Boz Elloy.

Our colleagues from IBM were also instrumental in the success of GMF and have been a pleasure to work with over the years. Thanks to Fred Plante, Anthony Hunter, Christian Damus, Linda Damus, Mohammed Mostafa, Cherie Revells, and the rest of the GMF runtime team.

I have greatly enjoyed working with Ed Merks, who helped form the top-level Eclipse Modeling and served as co-leader of its PMC. Thanks also to Kenn Hussey, Paul Elder, Jean Bezivin, Sven Efftinge, and Frederic Jouault, all on the PMC representing the breadth of projects within Modeling, for making our project the success it has become.

Today the modeling team at Borland has expanded its Eclipse contribution to other technologies covered in this book. Thanks to Artem for pushing us toward Xpand, and to the openArchitectureWare team who initially developed it, particularly Bernd Kolb who was most helpful during the writing of the Xpand chapter. Thanks to Radek for taking on the task of open sourcing and improving our QVT Operational Mapping Language implementation, along with the talented Sergey Boyko and Alexander Igdalov. Thanks to Michael for taking on the task of developing UML diagrams using GMF for contribution to the MDT project, along with the excellent help of Sergey Gribovsky and Tatiana Fesenko. It has been a privilege working with Konstantin Savvin and the rest of our team in Prague and St. Petersburg over the past few years.

This book also served as an exercise to develop requirements for our commercial DSL Toolkit—thanks to our current management team, Steve McMenamin and Pete Morowski, for providing excellent support and encouragement. Thanks also to Tom Gullion and Ian Buchanan for being fantastic stewards and product managers for the Together product line.

Thanks again to those who reviewed portions or all of this book and provided valuable feedback, particularly Karl Frank and Angel Roman. I especially want to thank Artem Tikhomirov and Alex Shatalin for their support and feedback while writing this book. At Addison-Wesley, thanks to Greg Doench for his support and encouragement during the publishing process, and to Jovana San Nicolas-Shirley and Krista Hansing for making it readable. And thanks to Ian Skerret, who introduced me to Greg during EclipseCon 2007 and got the ball rolling.

On the home front, extra special thanks go to my wife, Pam, and son, Brandon, who afforded me the time and peace to work evenings and weekends, even through the winter holiday season of 2007. And finally, I must thank my parents for providing a strong foundation and the best possible example to live by.