Section: New Software and Platforms

NeoEMF

URL: http://www.neo4emf.com

NeoEMF (a relaunch of the tool formerly known as Neo4EMF) is an open source software distributed under the terms of the Eclipse Public License that provides a backend-agnostic persistence solution for big, complex and highly interconnected EMF models. NeoEMF is a model repository and persistence framework allowing on-demand loading, storage, and unloading of large-scale EMF models.

NeoEMF is designed to allow the easy integration of custom backends depending on user needs. By default, NeoEMF is bundled with out-of-the-box support for graph databases (based on the blueprints API (https://github.com/tinkerpop/blueprints/ ) and key-value stores (based on MapDB (https://github.com/jankotek/MapDB )). Blueprints is an abstraction layer for graph storages that allows changing the actual database used without affecting the application code. The blueprints-based back-end allows the integration of NeoEMF and Neo4j—among other databases—providing in NeoEMF the full set of features already implemented in Neo4EMF. MapDB is an efficient key-value store that provides concurrent Maps, Sets and Queues backed by disk storage or off-heap memory.

In terms of performance, NeoEMF eases data access and storage not only in a manner to reduce time and memory usage but also to allow big models to fit into small memory. This is provided through the following features:

• Lazy-loading mechanism. Model objects are loaded on demand while needed. In its basic configuration, model objects act as a proxy that ocuppy little memory, and fields are only retrieved when accessed.

• Caching. NeoEMF relies on database caches to retrieve EObjects, but in some situation this is not enough. For this reason, the architecture on NeoEMF allows the easy implementation of domain-specific cache strategies based on the decorator pattern.

• Auto-commit. In back-ends in which transaction data is stored on the heap, it is possible to use the auto-commit feature to split large transaction into several small ones.

• Dirty saving. The dirty saving feature is an step forward on the auto-commit strategy. It allows to safely handle big transactions by spliting them into small ones by saving partial changes made on models to disk. In case of transaction failure or cancellation, the partial model changes can be reverted and the model is restored to its original state.

A session about NeoEMF took place at eclipseCon France 2014 (https://www.eclipsecon.org/france2014/session/neo4emf-when-big-models-are-no-longer-issue ), held in Toulouse, France.

Works are still going over NeoEMF (within the context of the project ITM Factory - FUI14) to provide more utilities such as backend-aware query languages (which allows improving performance by taking advantage of the backend built-in query languages), concurrent access, model distribution, and other Ecore utilities.