And so, the big day is here. I’d like to say a big “thank you” to the members of the Model Development Tools (MDT) development team that made this release possible. This past release cycle has been an eventful one, with committers and components both coming and going. I’m proud of what we accomplished as a team (given the challenges we faced) and especially of the fact that MDT is listed as the third most popular project on the Eclipse Downloads page, behind PDT and Web Tools. A true testament to the value that modeling tools bring to the Eclipse ecosystem!

So, what’s new in this release of MDT? Four of the now nine components in MDT released today as part of Galileo. OCL 1.3 saw the addition of finer-grained control over debug tracing, support for big numbers, and an extensible type checking mechanism. UML2 3.0 subscribed to the EMF ultra-slim diet, migrated to the latest released version of the UML specification (2.2), and made some extensibility enhancements in the area of profiles. UML2 Tools 0.9 includes enhanced support for working with profiles and stereotypes, vastly improved look and feel, provisional support for sequence and timing diagrams, and (at long last!) the ability to specify which elements are included (synchronized) when creating a class diagram. Finally, XSD 2.5 added support for using an ecore:nsURI attribute on a schema element to specify the namespace URI for a schema without a target namespace.

But of course, that’s not the whole story behind what took place this past year. Two components (EODM and OCL Tools) were terminated and two new ones were created (Papyrus and MST). We also received a number of project proposals, some of which may yet see the light of day. We were sad to see the departure of some of our past contributors (most notably, committer emeritus Christian Damus, former lead of the OCL component) but heartily welcomed the many new ones that arrived! If change is an indication of healthy progress (and I believe it is) I’m happy to say that the MDT mini-ecosystem is alive and well. Here’s to a another successful release and the changes that the future is sure to bring!