We're currently evaluating Enterprise Architect (12, release candidate).
The main reason we'd like to use it is to use the reverse engineering feature, from c++ to UML.
Our code base is documented using Doxygen tags.
Now, the parser of EA does not seem to recognize these tags. Is there a way I could enable it?
Edit:
The things I'm looking for are not to be inserted in the UML, but added to the model of the project. For instance, information defined by #param tags for methods are inserted in the "notes" of the methods and not in the "notes" of the parameters. The #author doxygen tags are not taken into consideration when generating the model, etc.
Some easy out-of-the-box customization of the parsers is probably not available.
I was solving similar problem of importing custom metadata (developer responsible for the class, corresponding database table or view mapping the entity, deployment package (.dll) and architecture layer, human-friendly class description, reference to specification documents etc.) contained elsewhere and making them available inside the Enterprise Architect in the form of informal notes and formal tagged values.
After some attempts to generate this metadata info as doxygen-style comments I gave up as the doxygen comment parser did not seem to be customizable and in order to make the non-ascii characters correctly imported the source code files had to contain the UTF-8 BOM preamble, which is not very 3rd party legacy tool-friendly encoding.
I have decided to go the way of generating XMI file with all the metadata placed inside the tags and documentation XML elements.
Before I resolved correct XMI encoding of composition and aggregation relationships the project was stopped at the phase when all the classes and attributes and associations and all the metamodel attributes (as notes and tagged values) were in there in under 600 lines of C# XMI-specific code and we had the few thousands of classes in EA available for analysts to work with.
In your case you may solve the need in a similar way:
import the C++ code base into Enterprise Architect using the reverse engineering
extract the doxygen comment metadata using some tool like doxygen's GENERATE_XML feature
export the Enterprise Architect model in a round-trip-friendly XMI format
write a single-purpose tool that will take the XMI model, your comment metadata and spit out new XMI model annotated with your proprietary information
import the XMI model back, done.
For steps 3...5 there may be an easier way as Enterprise Architect has the Scripting and Automation interface which allows to read/modify the model using languages like Visual Basic or C#
Related
I have a domain model that is created using ecore EMF.
And I would like to generate POJOs. I would like to be able customize the POJOs, so I am looking at using Acceleo.
However, I can only see creating POJOs in Acceleo from UML. When using EMF it produces EObjects, Estrings etc.
Is it possible to just produce POJOs?
With Acceleo, you can generate anything you want. If you want to generate just POJOs from an UML model, you can use or fork the UML to Java generator available on Github. If you do, make sure to use the version matching the version of UML that you are using (master branch for UML2 v4.0.0, R1_1_maintenance branch for UML2 v3.x.x).
If you are using UML2 v3.x.x, you can simply install it by using the Eclipse Marketplace. The 2.0.0 release of the generator fo UML2 v4.0.0 will be released soon.
See the following link for generating POJOs with EMF:
http://eclipseo.blogspot.be/2007/10/creating-pojos-using-emf.html
If you want to customize this even more, you could also use other methods:
XPand
XText
Acceleo ECore generation templates
etc
I was looking for an RDF project for django and I cant find any active.
This seems to be a good one http://code.google.com/p/django-rdf, but the last commit was in 2008, (4 years ago). The group in google-groups seems to be abandoned. Last no-spam post was in 2008.
Therefore it has no support for new django versions.
Is there any library or some prebuilt open source app to easily expose rdf data?
Maybe is easy to solve, like writing a view and returning something using https://github.com/RDFLib/rdflib in one or two lines of code, but I can't figure it out how to do it...
The idea using RDFlib would be to take a django object or collection of objects and transform it to rdf in some way, maybe using an rdf parser.
I thought I could give html responses if the client request "accept:text/html", and RDF if the user requested the same page using a html accept header with rdf+xml or rdf+turtle (and it could exist an app that handles that for me)
From what little I've read of RDF you are probably going to have to do manual work to get meaningful RDF statements from Django models since it's not a simple data representation format like JSON, it is trying to encode semantic meaning.
That said, have a look at django-rdflib:
https://github.com/odeoncg/django-rdflib
There doesn't seem to be any documentation (and it seems to have been built for a specific app) but the author has posted here about a manage.py syncvb command that generates an RDF graph from existing Django models:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/django-rdf/14WVK7t88PE/ktAKJo-aCfUJ
Not sure exactly what views django-rdflib provides, but if it can make an RDFlib graph for you then you can probably use the serialization plugins provided by RDFlib to output rdf+xml or whatever from your own view.
http://code.google.com/p/djubby/
SURF is useful as a RDF->object mapper (or RDFAlchemy)
injecting rdfa into your templates should work either (if you want to avoid triplestores)
you can also expose your database as a sparql endpoint using a tool such as http://d2rq.org/
I would like to do bidirectional Model2Model transformations. Both models are EMF / eCore based. Actually I would prefer that one model is an editable view on the other.
What are my options?
Which tools and tranformation languages are avaiable and what are their restrictions?
M2M are the hardest. Industries strength tools are rare, lots of academia stuff. If you're dead set on a M2M language, look into ATL which should also support ecore. Otherwise you can look at Xtend, which was made for model to text but you can abuse it and it should be more comftable than plain java. If your into research look at Scala based transformations here
http://metrikforge.informatik.hu-berlin.de/attachments/download/193/george_wider_scheidgen_ICMT_2012.pdf
There are more transformation tools than you can imagine for EMF, its kind of crazy...
For metamodel to metamodel transformation where the models are not very similar:
ATL is probably the most popular and most "baked"
Epsilon project has the Epsilon Transformation Language.
If the metamodels are very similar and you only need to tweak some things then there are tools targeted that type of migration/updating:
ATL now has a refining mode
Epsilon has Flock
Edapt looks very interesting as well because it does the metamodel/model changes together. It lets you work on a tree view and comes with a set prebuilt set of rules.
Henshin which lets you operate on a diagram view of the model
EMF Refactor is a more code-level approach, that can also use Henshin rules somehow.
You can always directly manipulate the metamodel and model using the EMF Java APIs as well.
I'll add, if you are doing any real EMF work you will need to get and read EMF: Eclipse Modeling Framework. It's available in Safari also. I highly recommend Safari, for $39 a month you get almost every development ebook you could ever use.
If you insist on doing bidirectional M2M transformations, (so-called Bxs), then know that there is an active researcher's community updating that wiki : http://bx-community.wikidot.com.
If you visit it, you will find that they list a bunch of tool suitable for Bx transformations http://bx-community.wikidot.com/relatedtools.
I used ECHO in the past which provides an implementation of QVT-R based on the KodKod constraints solver.
It's definitely worth giving it a try.
Since you specifically asked for bi-directional model transformations, I must say that you have no options. To make it claer, adding to the answer you got form Ed Willink, none of the existing M2M transformation languages (AFAIK) supports bi-directional model transformations.
Work on a QVTr and QVTc execution engine is starting to look promising if you are still interested in this: QVTd Project.
I've been looking at the resources definition of the Change Management module of the OSLC. Why using RDF?
Is this use related to semantic Web services?
Thanks
Put simply because RDF is portable, inter-operable and reusable
Using RDF means the data in your system is intrinsically reusable even by applications which know nothing of your specific data model (i.e. vocabularies and ontologies etc) since they can still process the data and extract information from it.
Also using RDF means you don't tie yourself to a proprietary/application-specific format or to a specific XML schema and you can easily extend your data model or add annotations which are ignored by the main application as you see fit.
Expanding on the OSLC concept —
OSLC aims provide common means of integrating resources through a common architecture using discovery, linked data, and common resource formats.
There are community topics on alignment to the W3c linked data and semantic web.
You can find out more here : http://open-services.net
A good introduction can be found here: http://open-services.net/html/case4oslc.pdf
We're in the middle of deploying a new software system to lot's of users in lot's of places (200+ users over 8 countries). In the past we've written a manual for the users, then update it every so often. This works ok, in that all the users ahve the same manual and it covers the main things but it has it's problems, like it doesn't get updated that often, we sometimes miss updates, and some users will have old copies.
We've been talking about using a wiki during the testing and deployment phases to build a knowledge base about the system. Ideally we'd then like some way to convert that into some form fo electronic document that we can then 'pretty-fie' and send out as the official manual, as well as letting users use and update the wiki.
Has anyone else done anything similar ? Any suggestions for wiki systems, workflows, document formats etc?
Most wikis support export via PDF e.g.:
MediaWiki PDF Export
DokuWiki PDF Export
TWiki PDF Export
You can write something that generates LaTeX from the wiki and renders a manual to PDF. With packages like hyperref you can retain cross-references as hyperlinks.
Additionally, you can integrate content from multiple sources such as a data dictionary into the LaTeX document, which can be mixed and matched with the wiki content. You could also set the architecture up so it can support cross-referencing that goes either way.
Framemaker could also support this using generated MIF files, and you could also use Lout in a similar way or convert your wiki content to docbook, which would allow you to use any of the many rendering options available to that format.
As an aside, the following Stackoverflow postings discuss various systems for maintaining documentation.
Application (Not a Markup Language) for Producing a User Manual
Can LaTeX be used for producing any documentation that accompanies software?
What tools are used to write documentation?
What tools does your team use for writing user manuals?
How best to write documentation (ideally in latex) targeting both the web (html) and paper (pdf)?
Best tool(s) for working with DocBook XML documents?
What is the recommended toolchain for formatting XML DocBook?
Is a successor for TeX/LaTeX in sight?
Madcap Flare is a help-and-manual authoring tool that uses HTML for the source of each topic. You could pretty easily do a mass import of the Wiki pages. Would then require some cleaning but after that you have a nice single-source system that can output CHM, web-browsable help, PDF, DOC/DOCX, etc.
How are you storing the help source at the moment? Is it MS Word files, MS help, LaTeX?
If you put your help source files under version control then you will get all the benefits of a wiki without having to migrate to a new system - people can make edits to the help files easily - those changes can be tracked, reverted etc. and you get the prettified manuals as before.
I followed Node's links and came across some mediawiki pages that I thought were noteworthy.
Extension:OpenDocument Export
Extension:PDF Writer
Category:Data extraction extensions
I gave a previous answer which may be useful for the "wiki to PDF" part -- look at using the open source PediaPress code or functionality. You can get ODFs from it too, although their PDFs are already quite pretty (but you might want to rebrand it and restyle it for your company I suppose).