Thursday, July 18, 2002

SOAP::Lite contains a Net::Jabber transport among others
and an XML::RPC support.

It looks very promising.

Alternatives to CORBA xpidl is a tool for generating XPCOM interface information, based on XPIDL interface description files. It is based on the GNOME library for ORBit, libIDL.

Hey All,

I've been silent for a while on the topic of tools. I've been cranking
away getting the last pieces in place, and they finally work. I was
able to get 75% of the automation in place pretty simply, but then I
wanted to do the other 25% and it required some thinking, some trial
and error (mostly error), and a lot of coding.

Anyway, it's done:

All tests successful.
Files=126, Tests=828, 15 wallclock secs (11.22 cusr 2.11 csys = 13.33 CPU)

That would means the Bio::MAGE::* hierarchy has 126 test files (one
per class) with 828 total regression tests, and they all passed,
YEAH!!!

Tool Inventory:

* XMI.pm: perl module that rips pieces out of an XMI file, and
maintains the information in an internal data structure

* xmi2class.pl: a perl script that converts the internal data
structure into XML files:
- either one large file with all the classes
- individual files, one per class
- package files that contain all classes for a package.

* create-mage-classes.pl: a perl script that takes XML files created
using xmi2class.pl and outputs perl classes, makefiles, and
regression tests. The classes can be output in different ways:
- as packages: all classes belonging to the package are written to
the same package module
- as individ

Small-scale XMI programming: a revolution in UML tool use? XMI is not an easy format for a human to read, and even small models can translate into large XMI files. However, the big advantage of XMI being based on XML is that the whole range of generic XML tools is available. Developers writing scripts to work on code generally avoid the need to parse the code, but scripts working on XMI can easily take advantage of parse tree information, because XML parsers are available in every popular language. The ability to analyse and manipulate XMI files means:
Analyses or changes that used to be tedious to do by hand using the GUI of a UML tool can be automated; and so the temptation to let the UML model get out of step with the code is decreased. For example, changes made to the model may propagate to the code using tools' own forward/reverse engineering combinations, so that a developer may choose to make a change to the model and propagate it to the code rather than just changing the code.
Any developer can write a script to extract information from XMI files and turn it into the input format of a proprietary tool they may be familiar with.

CorbaTrace CorbaTrace is a helpful tool for tracing communications beetween Corba objects.
Once CorbaTrace is installed, remote calls are intercepted and all information is stored in XML log files. After that, you will be able to apply filters and produce XMI files to see the communications beetween distant objects on a UML sequence diagram.



Useful
When you develop distributed software, it's very hard to find bugs and to understand where the troubles are in your architecture. Corba is one of the best, complete and most used standard middleware architecture.
So we have made a tool that can easily trace communications beetween objects and see the result on a sequence diagram.

Dandelion Dandelion0.5beta1. Partial XMI support. You can now generate XMI UML files by Dandelion. Analyze your project and see it with the various case tools which support XMI (MagicDraw UML, Argo UML, etc)! Here is the MagicDraw sample screenshot.

Graphotoron - about Graphotron is a simple XML language for drawing graphs with XPath.
The inspiration came from a Rick Jellife description of Schematron, problably this one: The Schematron differs in basic concept from other schema languages in that it is not based on grammars but on finding tree patterns in the parsed document.
XML documents are trees and if some kind of intradocument linking is used, they can describe a general graph. It is often said that a good picture is worth of a thousand words and so I have started to look for a way how program something like pictorial Schematron. I have been pleased to find a few very good programs (Graphviz, VCG, daVinci) which have at least some versions freely available. I did some experiments and found out that drawing pictures with XPath can be very simple.

Graphotoron - about Graphotron is a simple XML language for drawing graphs with XPath.
The inspiration came from a Rick Jellife description of Schematron, problably this one: The Schematron differs in basic concept from other schema languages in that it is not based on grammars but on finding tree patterns in the parsed document.
XML documents are trees and if some kind of intradocument linking is used, they can describe a general graph. It is often said that a good picture is worth of a thousand words and so I have started to look for a way how program something like pictorial Schematron. I have been pleased to find a few very good programs (Graphviz, VCG, daVinci) which have at least some versions freely available. I did some experiments and found out that drawing pictures with XPath can be very simple.