JET and JMerge

Just curious if you guys write in your book about these two tools for generating source code.
I found JET Tutorial Part 1 (Introduction to JET) on eclipse.org extremely interesting, so I am asking.

Michal,
No, the book doesn't cover JET at all. For the benefit of those who haven't looked at the JET tutorials, JET is the underlying technology that we use for code generation. It's definately not something you need to know about to use EMF, and as such, falls outside of the scope of the book.
JET is, itself, very cool technology. Since it's open source, like the rest of EMF, we hope that many people will be able to reuse it to power their own code generators. Of course, it takes quality documentation to make it accessible, so we're really thankful to Remko Popma for contributing those tutorials (available here and here). We'd highly recommend them for getting started with JET.
Cheers,
Dave

The book has more coverage of the JET-based EMF generator and its model (GenModel), than JET itself, but we do also describe JET templates in chapter 11.
By the way, there is another JET tutorial (Part 2) available now.

Thanks, Frank, for that correction. How could I have forgotten that?

The book's coverage of JET is enough to help an EMF user modify the templates to change the generated code patterns (yes, you can do that with EMF!). But, if you're interested in reusing JET in another application, it will no doubt leave you hungry for more information. And, the above linked tutorials are definitely the best place to satisfy that hunger.
Cheers,
Dave

The book's coverage of JET is enough to help an EMF user modify the templates to change the generated code patterns (yes, you can do that with EMF!).
This is a key for me. I'd like to be able to tinker with the templates and see what kind of havoc I can wreak. Like I said in a different post, I regularly generate JSPs and RPG code, and it would be interesting to see if EMF could help me along those lines.
You mention also that EMF is designed to run outside of the Eclipse framework. Does the book cover that?
Joe

Originally posted by Joe Pluta:
This is a key for me. I'd like to be able to tinker with the templates and see what kind of havoc I can wreak. Like I said in a different post, I regularly generate JSPs and RPG code, and it would be interesting to see if EMF could help me along those lines.
You mention also that EMF is designed to run outside of the Eclipse framework. Does the book cover that?

Joe, indeed it would be interesting, and the extensibility of the code generator is something we're planning to further improve.
As for running outside of Eclipse, there's not much to cover. It's really just a matter of ensuring that the EMF jar files are on the classpath when you run your application. The impact on the application is very small -- for example, how files and externalized resources are located -- and we do discuss these small differences throughout.
Cheers,
Dave

Excellent. Because one of the first things I'd like to try in my copious free time is to run EMF on the iSeries. The iSeries is a headless environment (no GUI support), so it will be interesting to see if I can EMF to work there.
I'd start small - generate an XML schema and try to use EMF to in turn generate the Java code. But my long-term goal would be to be able to use an RDB-based schema and then generate both XML and Java (as well as UML, to allow an interface to something like Omondo or Rational Rose).
Joe

Joe, one issue to keep in mind is that the EMF code generator uses the eclipse JDT, so to run it, you need at least a headless eclipse workbench. The EMF runtime can run completely standalone, but not the generator - you'll need some eclipse jar files as well.

Does the book explain how to do that, Frank? I've yet to set up a headless Eclipse environment, so that would definitely be a plus.
Joe

Joe, yes the book covers headless (command line) invocation of the generator.
Frank.