Migrating from previous extensibility APIs

The application programming interfaces (APIs) included in the Rational® UML modeling products are based on Eclipse version 3.2 and the latest compatible versions of Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and Graphical Editing Framework (GEF). Also, the Eclipse UML2 API has been modified to be based on the final UML2 2.1 specification.

About this task

The public extensibility APIs provided with the Rational UML modeling products enable clients to programmatically perform lifecycle changes to UML models. During the development phase for version 7 of the UML modeling products, numerous structural changes were made to the underlying code that resulted in major changes to the extensibility APIs. The following changes were the most notable changes:
  • Some of the Rational products platform plug-ins were moved to Eclipse open source and therefore required namespace changes.
  • The Eclipse UML2 API was modified to reflect the UML2 2.1 specification. In the previous version of the Rational UML modeling products, the UML2 API was based on the UML2 1.0 specification.
Note: The term UML2 refers to the draft release of the UML 2.0 specification. The API that was based on the initial UML2 specification is no longer included in the products. All client code using UML2 must be migrated to the new 2.1 API.

The Rational products platform plug-ins that moved to open source are contained in two new open source projects: the Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) and the Eclipse Modeling Framework Technologies (EMFT) projects. As a result of these changes, the public APIs available for UML modeling and for domain-specific modeling have increased. In addition to the UML2 API changes that were made to reflect the final specification, numerous convenience methods were added to the UML2 classes.


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