Re: EMF Forms

[dsh <da...@gmail.com>]

Hi Dan,

sorry for not replying earlier. I think having a DSL that would be
accompanied by a graphical representation including tool support to edit
that representation would be quiet interesting. Besides Eclipse I as well
worked with Sparx System Enterprise Architect and TogetherJ prio to its
Boralnd acquisition - so we do have something in common there :)

I once as well was fascinated by OCL, tho to me it looked like if you start
to enrich a model that way you somethimes maybe get lost or overwhelmed by
the richness and expressiveness of such models. So probably gold plating in
such circumstances should be omited. I as well ended up with models that
consumed a lot of memory and thus caused the JVM to crash :) These are
tools I evaluated at the time I worked on AndroMDA [1].

And yes tooling and metamodels is certainly something I am interested in!
That is in general and in the context of Apache Isis :)

[1] http://www.andromda.org/case-tools.html

Cheers
Daniel

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 8:14 AM, Dan Haywood <da...@haywood-associates.co.uk>
wrote:

> On 29 July 2014 20:01, dsh <da...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Concerning you remark that mentions TogetherJ - Do think of something
> > UML-like or something less formal?
>
>
> I guess I'm thinking UML-like, but only really for class diagrams at least.
>  Or rather, as a projection of Isis' own metamodel, to show the contributed
> actions/collections/properties... that'd be really cool.  Non-visible
> (@Programmatic) methods could then be shown/hidden as required.
>
> In terms of more lightweight options, we've also been kicking around ideas
> of supporting a DSL for Isis... it even has a name, "Kemble" [2] and a spec
> [3].  One of our committers, Maurizio, has even done some experimentatoin
> on this using Eclipse XText, though we don't have agreement in the
> community whether the implementation language (of the methods) should be
> pure Java or should be XTend.
>
> I also did a bunch of plugins for Eclipse many years ago [4].  Not been
> looked at for a long time, but had a few nice features.  The README lists
> what was working, once.
>
>
>
> > PS: I once contributed to AndroMDA, an approach that I nowadays consider
> > rather heavyweight considering that you had to craft huge UML models and
> > had to annotate them with OCL constraints.
> >
> >
> Ah, OCL, don't hear much about that these days.  But I used to rather like
> OCL, perhaps because once upon a time I was a mathematician.
>
> it'd be rather nice, wouldn't it, to allow OCL constraints to be embedded
> within Isis and have the framework.  I know that there's an OCL evaluation
> engine out there, perhaps it could be plugged in somehow.  But not really a
> top priority .... OCL practitioners are quite rare, I think.
>
>
> ~~~
> Interested to hear your thoughts on the above... given you've contributed
> to AndroMDA in the past, perhaps tooling and metamodels is something of an
> interest to you?
>
>
>
>
> > Cheers
> > Daniel
> >
> >
>
> [2] Kemble is a village near the source of the River Thames; Isis is the
> name by which the River Thames is called when it flows through Oxford, near
> where I live.  So Kemble is the "source" of Isis.
> [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ISIS-369
> [4] https://github.com/danhaywood/apache-isis-ide
>
>
> >
>