Hi, On Sat, 28 Sep 2002 10:02, Gonzalo Diethelm wrote: > Could anybody familiar with the Wakesoft Architecture Server > provide comments, opinions or flames regarding this framework? > I'm particularly interested in comparisons between this thing > and other frameworks, including Avalon. > > Just in case: http://www.wakesoft.com/
I wasn't able to get to the meat of this framework - I kept encountering marketese, white papers, user reports, case studies ... arg! However I think that I know what it probably looks like. Usually these sort of frameworks allow you to define an application model using some high-level modelling language (like UML or a derivative). This model is then used to either; 1. build a database of model at runtime and use that to "interpret" application. (ie I tend to use Commons DynaObject style classes in this sort of case) This will also add plugin points where you can write your domain specific services 2. generate the source code for the boiler plate code and allow you to customize it. Ie generate the Object Model, generate the database/network peers. Generate forms to edit objects etc. If source is generated the framework can either; a. Require you to subclasss things to get functionality (like torque allowing subclasses of objects) b. Require you to modify generated code My personal preference is to avoid (b) at all costs because it is hard to evolve and is basically "wizards" from MS world of development. There is a huge number of these frameworks around. Many are very specific to particular domains or technologies while others are more generic. Many more are emerging to deal with things like making 2-tier or 3-tier a deploy time concern. Using EJBs or not becomes a deployment concern etc. Sun has one of these frameworks, I believe Oracle has one. There is also a large number of opensource ones. One that someone has recomended to me is http://www.javanovic.com/ which I think is a Struts centric version of this. In Apache there is not anything like this. If you could extend the Torque xml model and use it to gernerate RMI distribution layers, gui forms and so forth then it may come close. Essentially the process ends up being Model --> Transform --> Write services == Application (Though some frameworks also have services as part of model). If Wakesoft allows you to extend their model, add more transforms (I think it allows this) then it could be useful. Then it just comes down to how well it matches your application domain. The worst development project I worked on used a similar toolkit that provide to be inflexable - which resulted in us doing 4-5 times more work than if we coded it up ourselves. In contrast, the best project I worked on used a similar toolkit and it saved us massive amounts of time. My last 4.5 projects have used a MDA style approach at least for certain aspects of the system and mostly worked well but we customized each model to specific domain. Anyways this sort of framework is othogonal to Avalon. In fact Avalon may be a target of that framework (or it could use EJB SessionBeans). If you want to see how I think it should be done; search back through the Avalon mailing list for "Attribute Driven Development" and "Model Driven Development". A couple of weeks ago I was yammering on about it ;) -- Cheers, Peter Donald *------------------------------------------------* | You can't wake a person who is pretending | | to be asleep. -Navajo Proverb. | *------------------------------------------------* -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
