An overview over the Fornax-Platform
This document gives you a compact overview over the Fornax-Platform. There are many perceptions to see the Fornax-Platform in. Therefore this document is splitted into 3 parts. Every part describes one of the perception with some explanations.
About the Fornax-Platform
The Fornax-Platform is an Open Platform to develop components and tools related to the Model-Driven-Software-Development - short MDSD. Based on the powerful openArchitectureWare Generator Framework we provide a great number of components.
The Fornax-Platform provides infrastructure and tools to enable the powerful development of such components. Additionally to this a great community with much knowledge about MDSD and Software-Engineering supports you if you have questions or problems related to this approach.
The Fornax-Platform is based on OpenSource-Tools like Subversion, Maven, Eclipse. All components will be released und a well-known OpenSource license, commonly an Apache2-based license.
Components used by the Fornax-Platform
As you can see the Fornax-Platform only used well-known components used by many other OpenSource-Projects too.
- Subversion
Subversion is our SourceControlManagement (SCM). All sources will be committed to this SCM to ensure the integrity of the projects. As Web-Interface to this SCM we have decide us for Fisheye. You can access our SVN-Repository at http://fisheye3.cenqua.com/browse/fornax.
- Eclipse
Eclipse is one of the best IDE's available. Since the availability of much plugins simplify the development process we recommend this IDE as primary development tool.
- Maven2
We use Maven2 as the Buildmanagement-System. It is more powerful than Ant, because we spliited the projects in small units. Maven2 supports - out-of-the-box - the management of dependent projects and has a matured dependency resolving mechanism.
- Confluence
The get the best collaboration of the projects hosted at the Fornax-Platform we decide to enable a wiki as collaboration platform. Confluence is successful used by Codehaus to establish a wiki-platform. Additionally to this Atlassian (the software-manufacturer of this wiki solution) offers an OpenSource license.
- JIRA
JIRA is a Trackingtool to tracks Issues, Tasks and more. It is a powerful Project-Managementtool. It comes frome the same Software Manufacturer like Confluence and offers an OpenSource license, too.
This components supports us to setup a stable development platform with much of features.
Recommend development tools
There are some recommendations about the development tools you should use to get the most out of the Fornax-Platform. Please note that this are only recommendations - not a must.
- Eclipse
Since openArchitectureWare (oAW) provides powerful plugins for the Eclipse Platform you can easily work with this Generator Framework. Additionally to this there are powerful plugins for Subversion, Maven and JIRA.
- Maven2
To reduce the amount of configuration and knowlegedge about the buildprocess we decide to enable Maven for the Buildprocess. With the Feature of the Parent-POM (common used configuration can be stored in a centralized file) we successfully reduced the configuration per project.
Additionally to this we habe develop some plugins to use the Confluence-Wiki as place for autmatically generated reports like Team, SCM, Issues and Depenedency-Graphs.
- openArchitectureWare (oAW)
openArchitectureWare is the most powerful Generator Framework available. Supporting multiple Metamodels (JavaBeans, EMF, UML 1 and 2,...) you are free to descide what you want to do. A well-done support for the development with Eclipse simplify the work with oAW.
- Mylar
Here a quote from the Mylar Projectpage:
Mylar is a task-focused UI for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy. It does this by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrating rich and offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA. Once your tasks are integrated, Mylar monitors your work activity to identify information relevant to the task-at-hand, and uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information, hide the uninteresting, and automatically find what's related. This puts the information you need to get work done at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit Mylar also facilitates multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise.
With Mylar you have the ability to track the resolving of an issue. You can record all changes you done to resolve an issue and commit all changes to the Subversion. Adding the number of the issue to the commit message anables JIRA to show all commits done for this issue. Every commit is linked to our Subversion Web-Interface (see http://www.fornax-platform.org/tracker/browse/CJB-5?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.ext.subversion:subversion-commits-tabpanel).
Structure of the current projects hosted by the Fornax-Platform
The Fornax-Platform have a well-defined projectstructure. This structure groups projects with the same background or target into folder. So every user can find the projects and informations on an easily way.
- Fornax-Internals
The Fornax-Internals groups projects needed for internal purposes. Internal means that this tools are used for administration and the Buildprocess. Generally the use of this tools is transparent for the projects.
- Cartridges
Cartriges provides Templates, Extensions, Code and more to solve a special problem. Often support for a framework (eg. Spring, Hibernate, EJB3,...) will be provided. But functional problems can be solved with a cartridge. Thsi group is commonly the one with the most projects, because there are many use-cases and offers the great benefit for the development.
- Transformers
The openArchitectureWare (oAW) offers a powerful transformer mechnism. This simplifies the development of powerful Model2Model-Transformers.
- Toolsupport
Here are projects grouped that offers support for special tools and frameworks. At now there is a Maven2-Plugin for the openArchitectureWare Generator Framework to seamless integrate the code generation phase into the build process.
- ...
We are open minded for new projects. If you are interested please contact us.
Conclusion
This document lightetd the Fornax-Platform out of 3 different perceptions. I hope some questions are be answered. If you have further questions please feel free to contact us.
