Eclipse

ProgGen – Code Generation

I’ve long been a supporter of the work that APG is doing in the Gen space, specifically with promoting the use of Model Based Development. It’s good to see that they are exploiting the true strength of a Model-Based-Development environment – i.e.  models for other purposes than originally designed – thus extending the range of possiblities and therefore getting more return of investment from those models.

They will be promoting their technology at CodeGeneration 2010 in Cambridge, UK.

I’d urge anyone with either an academic or professional interest in Model Based Development as a whole to attend this conference and hear what they have to say.

To connect with like-minded people to discuss Model Based Software Development, a great place is the SOMOMOSOEN group. There are some very informative papers which can be downloaded there.

At last the Eclipse !

I mistakenly overlooked possibly the most awaited event of the EDGE EMEA 2009 conference in my last post, and it was pointed out !!!

The fact is that the first official look at the r8 Eclipse-based toolset in Europe will be at EDGE EMEA 2009 in Amsterdam.

I’ve been talking about the move to Eclipse for a while (“Gen is Eclipse’d!“, “Total Eclipse of Gen – Possibly ?“, and “Eclipse Roadmap“). I even mocked-up what I thought Gen in an Eclipse environment would look like (this was on 5th September 2007 – almost 2 years ago !)

I think that this is genuinely a new look for the toolset and hopefully will draw developers to the tool who will find themselves at home in the familiar Eclipse surroundings. This’ll reduce the learning curve and increase developer productivity even more.

Maybe we need to revise those productivity statistics ?????

New whitepaper from ARIKAN – code restructuring

APG has produced a new paper in which they discuss code restructuring as part of a reverse engineering and modernisation exercise.

Code restructuring can be done in an automated fashion only if the meaning of the code is understood, rather than a line-for-line code transformation process.

ProgGen is such a tool – it can understand the semantic meaning of the code that it parses and allow the meaning of the code to decide what restructuring can be done. The power of the code restructuring toolset is that it takes the 3GL type code – PL/1, Natural, COBOL etc and creates a metamodel out of it, which can then be used to change the paradigms and indeed the language that the transformation is directed at.

This paper can be downloaded from here.

It is really worth a look, and demonstrates the power that APG can bring to bear on your Legacy systems to modernise them and restructure them into the bargain.

Grand Re-Opening Resources available

Here are the pictures from last night’s Grand Gen Village Re-Opening.

Download them as a zip file here

More resources over the next few days will be posted - slides, videos and podcasts to come from the presenters – APG, Jumar and Everware-CBDI.

COBOL to Gen to UML Capabilities

Following on from the 3rd Gathering’s dicussion on UML to Gen mapping, here’s a more comprehensive list of the comparisons between the UML concepts and Gen’s concepts.

Looking further, not only is there a list of comparisons, but it must be remembered that these are actively in development by the Arikan Productivity Group (APG) as part of the ModelCVS toolset

datX and Legacy Renewal are the first two components of the ModelCVS toolkit which are already commercially available.The Metamodeling Toolkit will be next, followed by the Java generation component and UML2 diagrams for Gen, as indicated in the link above.

It seems that there is a tide of opinion that UML is becoming increasingly required in systems development, therefore, we need some way of getting UML diagrams and Gen models to interchange information with one another. ModelCVS really does fit the bill. It is a complete toolkit to take the legacy-type systems – COBOL and PL/1 and transfer them to Gen models and provide the supporting UML to describe those systems. Now we know how powerful Gen can be once it has a model in its’ grasp ! Toolkits like this add value to your organisation than you can possibly imagine – the alternative is ditching your old systems and rewriting them from scratch – ModelCVS’s wizard-based approach makes it easy to do…..

ModelCVS is really worth checking out if you have older legacy-type systems that need to be renewed – the target of that renewal will be Gen and then you can take advantage of all that power!