Hi,
On 16 Jun 2010, at 05:33, Ross Boylan wrote:
On Wed, 2010-06-16 at 02:43 +0200, Tudor Girba wrote:
Hi,
On 16 Jun 2010, at 02:27, Ross Boylan wrote:
On Wed, 2010-06-16 at 02:17 +0200, Tudor Girba wrote:
I do not know SAS, but you should check to see if the concepts present in FAMIX are of use to you. If yes, you can directly instantiate them from your parser. If not, then you will want to code a new meta-model, or extend the current ones to accommodate your needs. You can then describe this new meta-model using FM3 (this is achieved via Smalltalk pragmas) and you get a browser and import-export in the MSE format for free.
Once you have your Smalltalk objects as instances of the meta- model, you can then use Mondrian and Glamour for building visual tools, or the MooseAlgos to express graph-specific algorithms.
Does this help?
Well, I was hoping that I would need to specify the meta-model or the meta-meta-model, but not both. That is, I was hoping the tools could build one out of the other. It sounds as if you're telling me I need to do both.
You do not define the meta-meta-model, you use the existing one (FM3) by just describing in your meta-model elements (classes and attributes) using pragmas. That is, the meta-model holds the Smalltalk implementation, while the pragmas provide a higher level description for other kinds of manipulations.
I hope I'm misunderstanding :)
I think you are :)
Also, is there a guide to what the pragmas are?
We do not have much of a guide for the moment, but we have plenty of examples. For a class named "C" with one attribute "interestingAttribute" of type String, you have to define the followings:
- On the class size:
annotation <MSEClass: 'X'>
- On the instance side:
interestingAttribute <MSEProperty: #interestingAttribute type: #String> ^ interestingAttribute
Cheers, Doru
So, rephrasing the question slightly, is there a way to generate the smalltalk implementation directly from the pragmas? Or, even better, a graphical tool that allows you to specify the model and produces everything else from it?
At this moment, there is no graphical tool to define the meta-model.
On the pragmas, at least some of them are "documented" by the methods FMPragmaProcessor>>processCompiledMethod: MSEPragmaProcessor>>processClass:
Those are all that are relevant for the meta-describing your meta- model part.
There are some huge strings that are (meta-)*model specifications, e.g., FAMIXSpecifications>>famixCore30mse and their use by FAMIXSpecifications>>generateFamixCore30. What role do they play in the system?
These strings are indeed the meta-model specifications written in the MSE format. From an MSE format you can generate the Smalltalk implementation and the other way around. For example, through the MSE format we can import meta-models developed in another language and generate the Smalltalk implementation.
As mentioned before, there is no support for graphical support for writing MSE files. The main reason here is that Smalltalk already provides a good enough solution for quickly building classes and methods, and annotating them is a practical solution.
However, we do have a tool for browsing an existing meta-model: http://www.themoosebook.org/book/internals/famix/meta-browser
Cheers, Doru
Ross
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"Not knowing how to do something is not an argument for how it cannot be done."