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Please see the Quick Start Guide for setup instructions and the Lightweight Diagrams Tutorial for usage examples.

The Big Picture

The KIELER Lightweight Diagrams (KLighD) project aims at offering transient lightweight representations of models or parts of them, without incorporating complex editing facilities like graphical editors.
Instead graphical or textual representations are to be synthesized from a chosen fraction of a model base and dismissed if they are not needed anymore. This way the Model-View-Controller paradigm (MVC) shall be established at the users' front end of modeling tools. Although KLighD is intended to address graphical as well as textual transient views, the graphical ones are currently in the focus. The automatic arrangement of those views (macro layout) is contributed by ELK. Next to a classical Eclipse-based implementation of KLighD (this repository), there is also a web-based implementation of KLighD for diagrams in standalone web applications or as part of the VS Code IDE with communication over the Language Server Protocol using Sprotty, for more information on that see klighd-vscode and the LSP part in this repository.

Feel free to watch the following videos illustrating the idea and possibilities of transient views of models:

• http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~kieler/videos/klighd/InstantModelBrowsingAnnotated.mp4
• http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~kieler/videos/klighd/TextualModeling.mp4
• http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~kieler/videos/klighd/SCT.mp4 (textual modeling continued)
• http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~kieler/videos/klighd/SCG.mp4
• http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~kieler/videos/ptolemyViewer/PtolemyViewerHQ.mp4

For details on the objectives of our KLighD framework have a look at the above mentioned publication Just Model! – Putting Automatic Synthesis of Node-Link-Diagrams into Practice (Sec. I, III, & V) first.

Related Publications:

• Christian Schneider, Miro Spönemann, and Reinhard von Hanxleden. Just Model! – Putting Automatic Synthesis of Node-Link-Diagrams into Practice. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC’13), San Jose, CA, USA, 15–19 September 2013. Original publication is available via IEEE Xplore® (pdf / bib / poster).

• Christian Schneider, Miro Spönemann, and Reinhard von Hanxleden. Transient view generation in Eclipse. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Academics Modeling with Eclipse (AcME), Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark, 2012. Original publication is available in the joint proceedings of the co-located events on the website of the 8th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA'12) (pdf / bib).

Get the demo example DSL and KLighD diagram synthesis shown at XtextCon 2015 as well as the test model from here!

Incorporated Technologies

• The KRendering Notation Model
• The Eclipse Layout Kernel (ELK)
• Piccolo 2D

Instructions on how to prepare and publish a release