Wednesday, August 18, 2010

JPA Diagram Editor first milestone released

I am happy to announce that the JPA Diagram Editor project made its first milestone release - 0.5 RC1. Just follow the installation instructions, posted on the project's wiki, and you are ready to build your JPA model in a diagram. There is a nice Getting Started tutorial to help your first steps. If you want to take a quick look before installing, then check our demo on YouTube.

An example of a diagram created by the JPA editor

The JPA Diagram Editor is a new incubating project in the WTP Incubator. The project is initiated by SAP and aims to contribute the existing JPA Diagram Editor from the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio, and continue its future development in the Eclipse community. This contribution is based on the Graphiti project - the new graphics modeling infrastructure in Eclipse.

The official 0.5 version of the project will provide a stable release of the initial contribution. Due to the migration to Graphiti, there are some bugs to be cleaned and we are actively working on them. Nevertheless, we decided to release early to hear your feedback sooner. If you eventually find a bug, then please report it in the WTP Incubator Bugzilla (use component wtp.inc.jpaeditor). You can check the list of already reported bugs if that bug has already been found - we are actively testing at the moment.

Please, note that currently the JPA Diagram Editor supports only JPA 1.0 projects. This mean that you will not see the "Open Diagram" action in the context menu of JPA 2.0 projects. JPA 2.0 support is definitely on our radar screen. We will start working on it after releasing the stable 0.5 version.

Any feedback is very welcome. Especially with suggestions how to evolve the project in the future months. We are available on the WTP Incubator Forum and wtp-incubator-dev@eclipse.org mailing list.