Diagrams and visual languages are a great thing, but getting the layout just right for them to be easily understandable can be tedious and time-consuming. The Eclipse Layout Kernel provides a number of layout algorithms as well as an Eclipse-based infrastructure to connect them to editors and viewers. The layout algorithms are plain Java and can thus also be used outside of Eclipse.

If you want to know more, let us refer you to the ELK homepage.

The repository's structure is pretty straightforward. We only have a few folders:

• build: Contains all the files necessary to build ELK in all its different forms.
• features: Contains all the Eclipse features ELK consists of.
• plugins: Contains all the plugins ELK consists of.

ELK is built using Maven. To build the update site, simply navigate to the build folder and type:

mvn clean package

There are more build profiles available that are defined and documented in build/pom.xml.