General talk about software patterns

["Jens Dietrich" <j.b.dietrich AT massey.ac.nz>]

Dear all,

We have just tagged the wop-eclipse-plugin project as version. This version
is the result of a student summer project at Massey University done by Jevon
Wright and supervised by Jens Dietrich. In a nutshell, it is now possible to
select a java project in the Eclipse Java perspective and find the instances
for patterns defined in RDF in this project. The WOP workspace is built
dynamically from the eclipse project settings. A visual pattern browser has
also been integrated into Eclipse.  The third function is new - the ability
to extract patterns from eclipse java projects. This works as follows: a
wizard is used to select classes, their properties and relationships. These
artefacts can then be renamed using abstract role names, meta data (Dublin
Core) can be attached and the respective RDF file is generated. We also
generate RSS files to be used with Google Base, although this feature is
still experimental. We will continue to explore the use of services such as
Google Base and del.icio.us to attach meta info to pattern definitions and
repositories, and the use of derivation rules to process this information.
This is to support pattern discovery and selection. There will be two more
student projects on these issues in 2006 at Massey supervised by Jens.

There are two main limitations in the current prototype: 
1. There is currently only one pattern in the default repository
(AbstractFactory). This is because we have refactored the ontology in order
to align it with the work done by Tichelaar et al ("A Meta-model for
Language-Independent Refactoring1"), and we still have to refactor the other
patterns (i.e., the patterns supported by earlier versions of wop -
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=104645 ). We expect
this to be done until the end of March. Since the default repository is
deployed on our web server, fixing this problem will not require a client
update. 

2. The validation function in the publishing wizard is not yet working. The
idea is to run the wop scanner and make sure that it finds the pattern
instance that has been used to extract the pattern. This will also be fixed
until the end of March. 

The current version can be accessed as follows: 

-       please use Eclipse 3.1 and JDK 5 
-       go to the CVS Repository Exploring Perspective and create a new
repository location using the following settings: server
cvs.sourceforge.net, Repository Path /cvsroot/webofpatterns, use your source
forge id or anonymous as user name, and pserver as protocol
-       Open the repository location created, navigate to
Versions/wop-eclipse-plugin/VERSION_1_0_PREVIEW
-       Check out

Once you have downloaded the project, switch to the resource perspective,
open plugin.xml and click on "Launch an eclipse application " in the plugin
editor panel. This will open a new eclipse window. To run the scanner, you
will need a (non-trivial) java project. You can easily pull two sample
projects from source forge (into the eclipse instance started by the
plugin): HEAD/reflect-examples-mysqlconnectorj from /cvsroot/webofpatterns
or VERSIONS/mandarax/v_3_4 from /cvsroot/mandarax. Another interesting
project is HEAD/wop-examplesfrombooks with examples from two books on design
patterns which we have used to validate our pattern definitions. 
Important: if you connect to the internet through a proxy, you must
configure it in Eclipse (Windows->Preferences->WOP Preferences).

If you want to stay informed about wop and the upcoming release of version
1.0, please consider joining our mailing list
(http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=104645). Any feedback is welcome !
Please use SF bug tracking to post issues.

If you want to know more about the WOP project, please go to
http://www-ist.massey.ac.nz/wop/ . This site contains links to WOP related
presentations and publications.

Jens




*******************************************
Dr Jens Dietrich
Senior Lecturer Computer Science
Institute of Information Sciences & Technology Te Kura Putaiao o
Hangarau-a-Mohiotanga Massey University Palmerston North New Zealand
Phone: +64 6 350 5799 ext 2212
Email: 
J.B.Dietrich AT massey.ac.nz
Web: http://www-ist.massey.ac.nz/JBDietrich/
*******************************************