Documentation updates

[jjpe]

I'd like to take this opportunity to request some documentation updates. Outside of actually reading the source code (and with 10k+ SLOC there is too much of it to read within the scope of my master thesis) it is surprisingly difficult for me as an outsider to get up to speed with this project. I have looked in the following places for documentation:

1. the main website as well as the doc and plugins sections of the site
2. the github page
3. The talk presented by Martin Thiede.

The talk in particular is helpful in getting some basic stuff up and running (apparently generating the ECore metamodel, somehow a language is generated from that and that in turn can be serialized to a text file). But I'm still not sure what to make of all of that. Is there some prerequisite knowledge I am missing? If there is, it would be nice to see that in the README.md here in the github repo so that I can read up on it. In particular I need to know the following:

1. What is the basic use case?
2. How do I expand on that basic use case?
3. The talk helped me in getting some basic stuff to work (see above). But how do the plugins (for eclipse, vim etc) factor into that?
4. This language that is seemingly derived from the metamodel, how do you define what it is and what its semantics are? The customization options I've seen so far just entail serialization options (don't use quotes for attribute X, include relation Y, don't include attribute Z etc).

[mthiede]

It certainly helps to have some deeper understanding of the model based approach rgen and rtext is intended for. There is another article that you might find useful: http://www.infoq.com/articles/thiede-ruby-modelling

The plugins help you edit the languages you create with RText. There is a little example in the "test/integration/model" folder. With one of the plugins installed, open the file test_metamodel.ect and test the editor features like content completion, reference navigation and error annotation.

Based on RText we have created a language for the AUTOSAR Automotive Standard. There is a web demo which you can test without installing any of the plugins: http://atm.esrlabs.com/
Note however, that the web frontend (the web plugin) is currently not open source.