Donnerstag, 24. Juli 2008

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2008

Recently I am taking part in the GSoC. My job is to implement a refacoring feature for the MDA/MDD generator framework openArchitectureWare.
As you can see at the project's wiki site, I am almost finished implementing the required features.

I implemented a protoypic eclipse integration using the Language Toolkit (LTK) first. This was (and still is :)) a prototype, since I wanted to focus my efforts on the algorithms the whole refactoring is based on. The UI sugar comes later ;).

The implementation was easier than I thought. I became aquainted with the oAW source quickly, although it is commented very very raley :D. Very helpful were the Eclipse Type Hierarchy and Call Hierarchy. The Call Hierarchy is your perfect buddy for figuring out, how an API works.

A screencast showing the refactorings Rename Extension and Rename DEFINE can be found here (.flv 22.6 mb). Note that it is in german .. it was not meant to be published .. just a little status report for my gsoc mentor peter .. but if you cannot wait to see the refacorings in action, go for it! I will publish another screen cast with even more cool features the coming days.

I planned to finish the implementation of the refactoring algorithms by the end of this week.
Right now I am working on the Move Extension feature.

If this feature is implemented, I will take some days to clean up the code and make the abstractions clearer. Then I will start working on the user experience .. precondition checking, meaningful dialogs etc.