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

[Sandro Andrade]

Hello all,

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

In that scenario, my questions are:

1) What's the current status of CoSMIC toolchain ? How much does
CoSMIC abstract the middleware-specific artifacts from the developer ?

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

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 and provide a visual
environment for component composition and deployment and DAnCE
repositories integration.

So, any comments ?

Thanks,

Sandro Andrade
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Distributed Systems Laboratory (LaSiD)
Computer Science Department (DCC)
Federal University of Bahia
Brazil