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Home » Modeling » M2T (model-to-text transformation) » [JET] How modular should JET be?
[JET] How modular should JET be? [message #16844] Thu, 17 May 2007 13:42 Go to next message
Paul Elder is currently offline Paul ElderFriend
Messages: 849
Registered: July 2009
Senior Member
All:

This message is intended to encourage discussion. Please reply with your
thoughts.

I had thiscomment in another post:
> btw jet2 is by far the most flexible tool i have seen so far. its just sad
> that it has so much dependence on eclipse

This raises the question, how modular should JET be?

Right now, JET is pretty much one plug-in, and that plug-in has dependencies
on the platform, JDT, PDE and EMF. As I start planning the next release
(June 2008), of JET, increase modularity, with the goal of letting JET run
on more environments is likely to be a major theme

There are a number of axes to consider:

1) runtime - the ability to load and execute a compiled JET transformation
2) compilation - the ability to compile JET templates (and the resulting
Java code)
3) editing - the ability to edit JET templates

Some initial thoughts:
1. Runtime: For the 'runtime', there are two major dependency categories:
1.1 things required by JET tags
1.2 things required to dynamically load JET transformations, tag
libraries and XPath functions.

I can see getting to a runtime that is dependent only on Equinox (the
Eclipse implementation of OSGi) without much trouble. But, going the last
step, and running in any JVM would transfer a lot of responsibility from JET
to the invoking code (tag library registration, XPath inspector
registration, XPath function registration, ...).
Q: Is it a problem having an Equinox/OSGi dependency?

2. Compilation: Initially, I though compilation belonged only in Eclipse,
where I have the Java compiler, etc... But, one of the attractions of
templates (and JET) is that they are easy to edit. Technically, separating
compilation from Eclipse and even OSGi would be easier than doing this for
the runtime. But, I don't know whether anybody needs this
Q: Does anyone have use cases where compilation outside of the full Eclipse
platform and/or PDE build is needed?

3. Editing: Again, my initial thoughts are that editors belong in Eclipse.
But, if there are use cases where compilation outside of full Eclipse is
required (say in an RCP application), then it seems reasonable that editor
would also be required.
Q: Does anyone have use cases where editing JET templates outside of full
Eclipse is requried?

Please let me know your thoughts.

[Caveat: just because I solicit your opinion doesn't mean I'll be able to do
the work.]

Paul Elder
JET Lead developer
Re: [JET] How modular should JET be? [message #30627 is a reply to message #16844] Sat, 11 August 2007 01:05 Go to previous message
Eclipse UserFriend
Originally posted by: jerome.velociter.gmail.com

Hello Paul,

I'm new to this group since I started getting interested in jet2 only
recently, so sorry for the very delayed answer. (I also used to experiment
transformations with jet1).

It would indeed be great to be able to run transformations outside
eclipse. A dependency towards Equinoxe/OSGi sounds fair.

About your second and third question on editing/compiling templates, if I
do well understand, my answer would be yes, I've got a use case for this.
I may want to edit templates from a wiki, then do the compiling and
transforms via a plugin of the wiki webapp using wiki content as source,
and finally getting the output as other wiki content (templates, scripts,
content, ...).

Jet is great project!

Regards,
Jerome
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