Re: [Introspector-developers] Happy new year, plan for 2003

[Kyle L. <ky...@ar...>]

I will mostly repeat what you said so that I know I understand.

James Michael DuPont wrote:
 > the second step will be to document the meta-model in terms of the
 > common lisp object system CLOS. it is a well understood model that has
 > well defined semantics. I thik that a CLOSGenerator (Like a
 > java-generator) is the right way forward.

CLOS may be very good MOP (Meta-Object Protocol) to copy.  It may be too 
flexible; being needlessly complex to handle situations never used.  I 
really do not know much about the CLOS.

 > But we need to do one more thing :
 > Thirdly. all the language generators currently describe classes,
 > the java generator creates classes. but what about objects?

I am sure that this is not a problem for CLOS.

It is not a problem for Java either; the reflection API is sufficient to 
create objects and populate their fields.  We may want to add a simple 
API on top of it for some more-commonly used operations. (assuming 
anything is even built in Java)

 > we nee an JavaInstance generator : the ability to create code that
 > represents instances of java, in terms of the generated classes. Also
 > we need to be able to read in instances from an XML/RDF feed.

So, I guess you are saying we need a standard MOP, probably like CLOS. 
This standard MOP should be able to handle the majority of languages 
introspector plans on inspecting.

Will this standard MOP will take the form of a document that humans can 
read?  Or are we going to have it hidden in implementation code?  :)

 > so to summarize :
 >
 > 1. support the creation of meta-model from the rdf input from the gcc.
 >  : meta-circularity
 >
 > 2. support the generation of CLOS classes
 >  : using a well defined class model to document ours
 >
 > 3. support the generation of source code for instances of
 > Java, perl, CLOS, sql from the rdf, in terms of the generated classses.
 >   : creation of literal source code that creates instances from the
 > literals (constants)
 >
 > 4. Support reading of the rdf files and generation of these instances
 > as programm code.
 >   : creation of source code that creates instances from a variable file
 > of data.

So introspector plans to:

	Read in nodes from gcc
	Build an internal representation (functions, and classes)
	Serialize to various languages

In essence we will have a language conversion facility.


What language is this all written in?  Perl?


Thanks



----------------------------------------------------------------------
Kyle Lahnakoski                                       ky...@ar...
(416) 892-7784                                    Arcavia Software Ltd