+1
I'd like to use this plugin as part of work I'm doing to integrate Daffodil
and Apache Drill.
Drill is distributed. Having a standard way to compile schemas makes it
easier to arrange to move them around the drill cluster (e.g., in a Jar
file)
On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 11:09 AM Steve Lawrence <slawre...@apache.org>
wrote:
> Over the years, SBT has become the standard for building and testing
> DFDL schemas. One problem we've come across is lot of boilerplate is
> needed to set up a schema, for example setting up dependencies, test
> options, directory layout. We've create the daffodil-schema.g8 repo to
> help with this, but it is still complex and is a manual process to
> update with newer versions of Daffodil.
>
> We think an SBT plugin could help to solve this and more.
>
> For one, it could provide all the common settings and dependencies the
> DFDL schemas have to copy/paste today. And updates to the plugin could
> update settings as well.
>
> Additionally, we've found it can be difficult to create and distribute
> saved binaries in a repeatable and consistent way, especially
> considering binaries are Daffodil version specific. It would be much
> easier to run a task like "sbt packageDaffodilBin" to create these
> binaries. No need to setup classpaths or run the CLI, just a single
> command it it does everything. An SBT plugin could provide this
> functionality.
>
> Similarly, one could imagine a custom sbt task to generate C code
> directly from the schema without having to using the CLI.
>
> One could also imagine a plugin providing the ability to read TDML files
> and run tests directly from those without the need for associated junit
> Scala files, reducing boilerplate (though, this may have issues with
> IDE's).
>
> Or the ability to enable coverage reports to determine how much of
> schema is actually used by TDML tests.
>
> There are likely a number of other tasks an SBT plugin could add to make
> the lives of DFDL schema developers and users easier.
>
>
> To solve some of these problems, Owl started development of an SBT
> plugin called "sbt-daffodil", with plans to make it publicly available.
> It currently only implements the ability to create and publish saved
> binaries, but we think it is at a good state where it makes sense to
> open source it--it provides stable and useful functionality, but is not
> too big yet.
>
> And we think the Apache Daffodil project is the best place for it to
> live and continue development. Because it will want a separate release
> cycle from Daffodil, it probably also wants a separate repository, so I
> suggest we create a repo called:
>
> apache/daffodil-sbt
>
> Once released, a DFDL schema repo could then add something like this to
> the plugins.sbt file and get all the settings and capabilities useful
> for a DFDL schema:
>
> addSbtPlugin("org.apache.daffodil" % "sbt-daffodil" % "1.0.0")
>
> Any thoughts on future capabilities, an alternative approach, or
> objections to being part of Apache Daffodil at all? Giving the standard
> 72 hours for discussions, if there are no objections I'll go ahead and
> create the repo and create a pull request to start review on the current
> code.
>
> - Steve
>
