[Ace-users] Re: [ciao-users] CIAO productivity tools ...

Douglas C. Schmidt schmidt at dre.vanderbilt.edu
Fri Aug 31 20:04:23 CDT 2007


Hi Sandro,

> I have been wondering for some time about how to leverage development
> productivity when using TAO/CIAO technologies. It's clear for everyone
> the benefits introduced by CCM when compared to CORBA 2.x development
> model

Yes, indeed.

> but it's also evident that CCM-based development implies
> worrying about middleware-specific artifacts.

Can you please explain what you mean by "middleware-specific artifacts?"
Do you mean things like CCM containers, XML deployment descriptors, and
deployment plans or something else?

> In that scenario, my questions are:
> 
> 1) What's the current status of CoSMIC toolchain ? 

Please see

http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/cosmic/

for info on CoSMIC.  There are also a bunch of papers on various MDE
tools in CoSMIC available at

http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/resume.html

> How much does CoSMIC abstract the middleware-specific artifacts from
> the developer ?

Again, it's not clear what you mean by "middleware-specific artifacts,"
but I recommend you take a look at CoSMIC, particularly PICML.

> 2) We know that MDA is a very promising technology for potencial model
> reuse but wouldn't it be better if there is a more easy-to-use
> approach ?

Such as?

> I mean, using CoSMIC requires understanding the MDA process and
> developing of PIM models.

Actually, CoSMIC isn't really related to MDA at all.  Moreover, since
it's (currently) focused on CCM it's a PSM tool, not a PIM tool.

> What about the EJB3 annotated classes approach ? Classes look like
> ordinary classes (POJO - Plain Old Java Objects) and annotations are
> used to guide the deployment process.  There isn't initial need for
> callback methods and deployment descriptors. Of course, we would need
> a more clever container and deployment infra-structure but I think
> this is a good approach for development productivity.

CIAO is based on the CCM standard, which doesn't define annotated
classes.  That's not to say that such an approach isn't useful, of
course, just that it's not standard CCM.  I think there are a wide range
of good alternative component model approaches that aren't
standard-compliant CCM.

> We have been working on the development of a visual configuration and
> deployment tool for CIAO/DAnCE: the ATOME tool (http://atome.sf.net -
> sorry ! yet in portuguese). The general idea is to insulate the
> developer from CIAO-specific artifacts like IDL/CIDL/MPC files,
> executors and deployment XML descriptors 

BTW, by "CIAO-specific artifacts" do you mean "CCM-specific artifacts
implemented by CIAO"?

> and provide a visual environment for component composition and
> deployment and DAnCE repositories integration.
>
> So, any comments ?

Sure - it's a bit hard to tell what ATOME does since I don't read
Portuguese ;-)  But seriously, the screenshots at 

http://atome.sourceforge.net/screenshots.htm

look interesting.  It's not clear, however, how these tools differ much
from what PICML does.  If there were an English synopsis of ATOME that
we could compare with PICML that would be great!

Thanks,

        Doug



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