Re: More basic questions please

I wish to thank you for this detailed reply.
It really helps!

Tal Beno.

"Martin Matula" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Hi,
> please see my comments below:
>
> BTal wrote:
>
> > I would like to know please if there is a road map for MDR. What are the
> > plans for this tool in the foreseen future? Are you working on a new
> > version?
>
> In the near future we plan to do an architecture review of MDR,
> finalizing the set of APIs. As a result of that we may break the
> compatibility btw and I plan to clean a few things and add make the
> "planned change" events vetoable. This is required in order to make MDR
> an integral part of NetBeans releases. We are currently working on a
> metamodel of Java and its implementation. All the Java metadata (about
> classes in currently open projects in NetBeans) will be available via
> JMI in NB 4.0. This will also enable us to implement refactorings.
>
> > Also will it upgrade to support MOF 2.0? Will it use CMOF (in opposed to
> > EMF's usage of EMOF)? Will MDR support UML 2.0 conversions?
>
> We are still not sure whether to upgrate to MOF 2.0. As MOF gets more
> popular and one of its requirements were to share the same core with UML
> 2.0, too many people started to add new stuff, change everything from
> the roots, which made both UML and MOF very complicated not only for
> tool vendors, but also hard to understand for users. We are now trying
> to fix this in finalization task force in the OMG. If that does not
> succeed, we will probably implement EMOF only (if we will see that it is
> likely that it will get adopted by people). It will take several months
> to make the decision since FTF is not finalized yet and JMI for MOF 2.0
> has not even started.
>
> > IBM claims at the EMF faq that: " The Eclipse EMF Java mappings have
been
> > optimized for in memory tool integration using Java and XML while JMI
has
> > been optimized for metadata repository usage scenarios". Is this the way
you
> > guys are looking at the comparison between the two (very similar)
products?
>
> I would agree with the first part of sentence - EMF seems to be heavily
> driven by what you can do in Java and XML. So it is more like a simple
> model of XML. And it may proof itself (and maybe it is already the case)
> that it is enough to do an efficient metamodeling. MOF was more driven
> by what we need in order to have a good meta-meta-model that could
> easily by mapped not only to Java, but also to IDL and other languages
> and what construct it would be nice to have to navigate the metadata
> efficiently. It explicitly defines lifecycle of objects, identity, etc.
> so that these things are the same no matter which platform your
> metamodel is mapped to.
>
> > Reiterating the question in the thread below, do you have plans to have
MDR
> > evolve into a MOF central repository system/tool? I noticed the JDBC
work
> > being done lately, but I was wondering about the importance of this
aspect
> > in your road-map.
>
> For NetBeans the JDBC storage is not that important (if it was, we would
> put resources into developing it ourselves). Our main usage of MDR is
> very similar to IBM's usage of EMF - we want to use it as a (meta)data
> integration platform in our tools. So the fast, not necessarily too
> robust and tightely integrated b-tree with an efficient paging mechanism
> (to avoid high memory consumption) is more appropriate for our usecase.
> Currently we are redesigning the Java module to use MDR to expose
> metadata about Java applications open in NetBeans to other modules.
> Other modules will hopefuly follow.
> Regards,
> Martin
>
>
>