Acceleo/Runtime

Runtime

Acceleo is based on three separate components: the compiler, the generation engine and the tooling. The acceleo runtime is composed of the generation engine and the compiler.

Compiler

The Acceleo compiler can be found in the bundle org.eclipse.acceleo.parser. In this bundle, you can use the class AcceleoParser to parse a "mtl" file and return the root of the "emtl" file. That root can then be serialized in a file with the "emtl" extension. The Acceleo parser can parse Java.io.File, org.eclipse.core.resources.IFile or java.lang.StringBuffer and then create the emtl file matching the mtl File or IFile or it can return the emtl in EMF resource.

Generation engine

The generation engine can launch an Acceleo generation from an Acceleo module and and EMF model. In order to create a starting point for your generation, you should add a [comment @main] tag in your main template. Thanks to this tag, Acceleo will generate a basic Java class to launch the generation. If you want to customize this class, please take into account that we are using JMerge and as such you should transform some of the "@generated" annotation to "@generated not" because each changes to the module containing the main template will relaunch the generation of the matching Java class and your modification would be lost. This class extends the AbstractAcceleoGenerator and you can easily customize its behavior. If you want to change the loading process of the input model, for example to use an EObject that is already loaded in your application instead of loading it from a serialized file, you can override the "initialize" method.

Stand alone

The Acceleo runtime can be used in a stand alone environment without any dependencies to the Eclipse IDE, as such it can be embedded in a good old Java application. Acceleo 3.1 will feature some specific Ant and Maven tasks in order to call the Acceleo compiler and the Acceleo generator in stand alone easily.

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