A first look at Papyrus for Information Modeling (with video)

A while ago, I promised to take a look at the Neon-based Papyrus. As many already know, Papyrus is an Eclipse project for UML modeling. I have already published several reports about Papyrus. Here are the first impressions of Papyrus for Information Modeling.

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Video tour Papyrus IM

The following video gives a short tour through Papyrus IM. A sample project is installed and viewed, and a new Papyrus project is created.

Software or framework?

Papyrus has grown significantly over the past year. positioned as a frameworkwhich can be consumed for your own developments. Incidentally, this is how it has been used in recent years, as part of other tools such as Topcased, OPEES, PolarSys or openETCS. Nevertheless, the developers are aware that it must be possible for potential users to evaluate Papyrus. Currently, the best option is Papyrus for Information Modeling (Papyrus IM), which is a stand-alone, customized modeling environment.

Papyrus for Information Modeling

Papyrus IM is, as the name suggests, a customized Papyrus. In this case, this means in particular that the GUI has been drastically reduced. A recurring criticism of Papyrus was that the many menu entries, toolbar icons and properties made it difficult to recognize what was important for the current project. Papyrus IM hides everything that is not needed for information modeling.

What exactly is meant by "information modeling" is explained by the List of supported model elements are defined implicitly. In short, only UML class diagrams are supported.

Download, installation and documentation

On the Papyrus download page two versions are available: The stable 0.7.0, based on Mars, and the development build, based on Eclipse Neon. I tried out the development build. The installation consisted of unpacking a 250MB ZIP file, as usual with Eclipse.

Papyrus IM provides the now extensive Papyrus manual via the Eclipse help system, but this is neither IM-specific nor particularly up-to-date (there are references to Kepler). Nevertheless, this is better than what many other open source tools offer.

After a bit of searching, you will also find IM-specific help: From the welcome screen (Help | Welcome), you can call up "Tutorials" via the menu at the top right, and below that Information Modeling | Getting Started. Below this is a brief overview of the GUI and the modeling of classes and associations.

First impression

The video above already gives a small impression of Papyrus IM. It is clear that a lot has changed in recent years in terms of usability and performance.

Only classes can be modeled with Papyrus IM. However, thanks to the reduction of the GUI, this can be done relatively quickly. The model can be validated and the result of the validation displayed directly in the model using markers, among other things.

Of course, creating a model is not enough. The video shows how diagrams can be exported as images, but this is only the most primitive way of utilizing a model. Eclipse IM supports OCL and validation, which should be a great help when modeling.

According to project information, there are many extensions, from document generators to code generators. Good support for version control (including model comparison) and the option of distributing the model across several files complete the picture.

Of course, for many applications it is not enough to just model classes. I see two uses for Papyrus IM: (1) It can be used to quickly create a domain model that is more than "just a picture". (2) Papyrus IM is good for a quick evaluation of Papyrus. For more, it needs to be installed and customized.

Image: Pedro Lastra / Unsplash