Renat Zubairov has been doing some really cool stuff with the Smooks UN/EDIFACT support that’s been added for Smooks v1.4.  On top of the ECT tooling, he has built tools for generating Eclipse EMF Ecore (XMI) models for each of the EDI Mapping Models being produced by ECT.  On the back of this work, he has been able to build an Editor for Eclipse, allowing you to read and write UN/EDIFACT messages from inside Eclipse.

See more here on the Smooks Wiki.

The UN/EDIFACT Editor for Eclipse is cool, but I think the wider impact of these capabilities is even cooler.  This is really important work because it will open a number of really important doors in terms of our ability to process and transform not just UN/EDIFACT, but EDI in general (X.12, HL7 etc).  Our long-term goal is to add support for X.12, HL7 etc to ECT (i.e. build conversion tools for these standards).  Once we do this, we will be able to provide out-of-the-box support for these EDI formats on the Smooks Runtime.  We hope it will also mean that we can use this work that Renat is doing to automate building of Ecore/XMI models for these same formats.  Once we have these Ecore/XMI models, we hope we will be able to:

  1. Build and provide XML Schemas (XSDs) for all of these messages.
  2. Make use of Eclipse EMF Compare to compare models e.g. compare 2 different versions (D93 and D96) of a UN/EDIFACT Invoice specification.
  3. Make use of Eclipse EMF M2M to create a transformation model between 2 different models e.g. between UN/EDIFACT and X.12 Invoices.

Note that this will not hit the main codebase until after we have released Smooks v1.4 i.e. we hope to make it available with Smooks v1.5.

This is awesome stuff.  Keep up the great work Renat!!!