[Mged-mage-python] Re: [Mged-mage] Use Cases, example XML files, example MAGEstk apps

[Diane T. <di...@ca...>]

> You may want to coordinate with the MAGEstk Python group, and see how
> far away they are from having a working version of the code, and that
> way all the writing of the MAGE-ML could be done for you automatically
> once you built and populated the appropriate MAGE python objects. This
> is a lot less error-prone then trying to write MAGE-ML using print
> statements. 


Well internally we're pushing more for persistent objects than an
object hierarchy to read and write XML files.

The components I'm currently trying to get working
  * Get XMI parsing working correctly
  * Split the persistence layer from the object layer
  * Implement auto-generation of primary/foreign key information
    for the relational layer. 

To make it easier for other people to contribute code I'm also trying to:
  * Improve documentation
  * Make clearly defined APIs.

Unfortunately this means that the code needed to traverse the object
hierarchy and write out the XML files is pretty far down on my to do
list. (And probably separate enough from the internals of this tool to
make a great project for someone else to take on.)

For some background on where we're currently at.

Pymerase (the name we've been using for the python tool that
implements MAGEstk) started off as a tool to generate an object
hierarchy to provide a python API to GeneX 2.

So it can currently parse the general table definition xml files
developed for GeneX 2 and from that generate:
  * objects that are tightly tied to the database.
  * sql create table statements.
  * prototype web interface to the database. (Thanks to Brandon)

(We have used the tool to develop prototypes for systems other than
GeneX or Mage, check the lib/Python/pymerase/examples directory in the
MGED/MAGEstk CVS tree).

I've gotten close to getting pymerase to generate things from the XMI
file. (Just a few more bugs...)

It is worth pointing out that there is a tension on the where I need
to spend my time developing pymerase, internally we want persistent
objects, while mage needs the object hierarchy without the tight
coupling to the database. So it might be a little while before I get a
chance to fully decouple it.

diane