A few months after the release of the first version of our open-source low-modeling low-code platform BESSER, we are happy to announce the release of BESSER v.2.

Adding on top of additional intermediate improvements (e.g. new code generators or multi-cloud deployments), this new version comes with a major improvement: a new web-based graphical modeling editorbased on a fork of the Apollon project, an amazing UML modeling editor.

Similar to other online modeling editors, with our editor, you can create B-UML models directly in your browser. And once you’re done, you can save the model or generate code from the same editor, calling the BESSER back-end services. Indeed, our new editor offers three main features:

  • Enables the design of B-UML models through a graphical editor
  • Provides access to BESSER code generators to directly download the generated code
  • Supports model import/export in B-UML and JSON formats

See it in action:

BESSER Web Editor interface

The BESSER web editor provides a graphical dashboard to create two types of B-UML models:

But we’ll add more modeling types soon. In particular, you’ll soon be able to add OCL constraints to your models, and parse them, thanks to the integration of our B-OCL tool. In fact, other improvements in this new release go in the direction of continuing our Object Constraint Language support by:

  • Extended OCL metamodel to handle DateLiteralExpressions
  • Improved grammar and parser to handle dates and reject construct

Read the full details of the release here: https://github.com/BESSER-PEARL/BESSER/releases/tag/v2.0.0.  Give it a try! And don’t forget that with BESSER, modeling is just the first step, there are many code generators available to help you maximize the ROI.

Code generators available in BESSER

Code-generators available in BESSER

Note that, for now, the editor needs to be self-hosted. We provide the Docker containers to do so (one for the front-end and one for the back-end services to manage B-UML models) so if you have ever worked with Docker and Docker Compose, run the editor is just a matter of deploying the containers. But, we understand this is still a barrier to entry for some users so, beginning of next year, we’ll also provide a “BESSER for fun” version hosted by ourselves so that you can start modeling just by going to our own URL.

As always, we’ll appreciate it if you show us some love, in any way or form that works for you. This includes using it for teaching purposes, e.g. check our low-code teaching initiative.

And if you’re more interested in a low-code tool for building chatbots, agents,… check our BESSER Bot Framework. We’ll integrate the two tools in the future (so that you can actually create smart software in one single tool, still our core goal) but for now you can play with them albeit separately.

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