Sirius: A Graphical Model is Worth a Thousand Words
Does your job consist in devising and designing innovative solutions in a complex environment?
If this is the case, you will need an efficient tool to describe your design choices, define an architecture, as well as analyze and validate it. What’s more, you must be able to communicate this work to various contacts: your clients, your partners, but also your development teams.
Sirius, an Open and Flexible Modeling Solution
Sirius meets this need. It’s an Open Source solution from the Eclipse Foundation that enables you to graphically design complex systems (software, business processes, physical, etc.) while keeping the corresponding data consistent (architecture, component properties, etc.).
To achieve this, Sirius provides you with a very easy way for creating a customized modeling workbench that is dedicated to your area of expertise and supports your design concept.
The product of a collaboration between Obeo and Thales that was started in 2007, Sirius is at the core of the Thales System Engineering workbench, which has been deployed in numerous operational units. Sirius is also the cornerstone of the IT applications design workbench of the French Ministry of Defense and underpins a technology used to create satellite applications for the European Space Agency.
What makes the abundance and variety of modeling workbenches created with Sirius possible is the great number of features offered in the standard version: viewpoints, layers, conditional styles, validation rules, navigation tools, etc.
An Open Source Project of the Eclipse Foundation
Available as an Open Source project since November 2013, Sirius has reached a significant milestone in the last months by integrating Luna, the new annual version of the Eclipse platform, released on 25 June 2014.
This goal, which had been set a year ago already, has been reached thanks to the outstanding work of the Obeo team in charge of the project.
Integrating the annual Eclipse version means compliance with very strict development standards and a stringent development process, guaranteeing the quality and transparency that have made the reputation of this platform, which is distributed worldwide.
This integration was the opportunity to go in depth and work on the product’s enhancement. A specific effort has been laid down on making the code modular to facilitate the integration of Sirius with other components of the Eclipse platform, such as Xtext. The performance, one of the team’s constant focal points, has also been improved in many areas to provide a better user experience and to allow for better scalability in order to support models with several hundreds of thousands of items.
Starting with its very first contributions, the Sirius team took steps to provide quality support and maintenance to the community of users (more than 200 replies on the forum, about 100 tickets solved).
As it is already being used by another Eclipse component, the Ecore Tools modeler, and by many players in the realm of industry and information systems, Sirius is now firmly established as a reference technology in the area of modeling.
To obtain assistance with setting up and deploying Sirius, take a look at our service and support offers.