Do you know Ecore? Looking for a reference card?

“𝐸𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑏𝑒 𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑒 𝑎𝑠 𝑠𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑎𝑠 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑠𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑟” probably was one of the mantra the Eclipse Modeling Framework team (Ed Merks, Marcelo Paternostro, Dave Steinberg among others…) sticked to when the created the core concepts which would allow the definition of all the others tools.

Ecore is a kernel, you define your domain specific model using these constructs. It boils down to classes, types, attributes and relationships, yet there is a lot of beauty in the way it has been designed and we can safely say it passed the test of time. In 2016 I tried to condensed all of it in a single reference card. I did not finished it to the point of publishing it but I’m doing it today (better late than never!)

To produce it I exclusively used Open-Source tools :

• Ecore Tools: Ecore diagraming editor built on top of Eclipse Sirius ,
• Inkscape : one of my favorite OSS tool to produce vector graphics.

I created 4 distincts diagrams from the Ecore.ecore model, then used the “Export as Image” feature of Sirius to get SVG files out of it. I dragged and dropped those file in Inkscape, scaled, composed a bit, and voilà ! Here is the refcard.

You can decorate your office now ;) Hope you enjoy

Do you know Ecore? Looking for a reference card? was published on February 09, 2023.