[albatross-users] An application generator for Albatross - preliminary work

[Dave Kuhlman]

On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 04:43:49PM +1000, Dave Cole wrote:
> >>>>> "Dave" == Dave Kuhlman <dkuhlman at cutter.rexx.com> writes:
> 
> I've had a look at the code and the resulting output.  This is the
> kind of stuff which would make Tim Churches very excited.
> 
> Things could get very interesting and tangled if you built an
> Albatross application to construct the XML document tree...
> 
> One of the problems with this type of application is that once you
> have started modifying the generated code you cannot go back.  You can
> go some of the way to handling this by dropping special comments in
> the generated code which tell the tool and the user which code belongs
> to the tool.

The kind of capability that you are suggesting, I believe, is the
ability to create a model or specification of your application,
generate code, and then make changes to the model or the generated
code while keeping both in sync.  That's a very big capability for
a little guy like me.  It's the kind of software engineering
capability that a company like Rational (http://www.rational.com)
has spent lots of man years and lots of money designing and
implementing.

I believe that there are some reasonably easy things that I can do
to get part-way there, however, ...

But, I think that I'd better gain some experience and learn more
about whether this is a valuable thing to do and about what would
valuable to do before I try to solve that *very* hard problem.

And, I hope to learn some things and share some ideas with Dan
Grassi on this.

I'm going on vacation for a couple of weeks.  I hope to see a bit
of Canada's prairie provinces.  I'll be thinking about this while
gone and intend to get back on it when I return.

  - Dave K

-- 
Dave Kuhlman
dkuhlman at rexx.com
http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman