This is intendet to be a collection of questions and answers regarding GMT architecture. It also is meant to store old discussion and to make GMT more clear to newcomers. As soon as this page is mature it can be a source for GMT FAQ
ARCHITECTURE DOCUMENT
Q: I think it would be of great value if you would start Architecture description with some introduciton. For example what do you mean by "GMT" or by "GMT tool set", "GMT Platform"? Purpose, Scope, Audience and Glossary would be simple to add, however would add great value! I would actualy create separate Glossary document, because terminology in GMT is quite important to understand.
A: A short Purpose, Scope, Audience is still missing. We should make a start. But there is no need for overlap with the glossary started on
http://www.mdsd.info.
Q: What does "gcore" name stands for? GMT core? Isn't gmtcore a better name then?
A: Just sticking with the eclipse.emf naming style (emf.ecore & gmt.gcore).
Q: Are there any prerequisites to understand the document? I am still having hard time to understand architecture contents.
A: It's not complete yet. It's a living document that needs to evolve and grow over time. But it's not intended as an exhaustive design document! It's intention is to convey the big picture so that GMT developers can get started and know where to look for more detail.
Q: Why would GMT architecture contain "spectoolgenerator". Isn't it one of the pluggable MDA tool components? I am not getting point of its importance!
I would concentrate first on building touchable core of GMT architecture and then take tool components one by one and try to integrate them.
A: Correct, it's the one [important] MDA tool component that's part of GMT.
(FUUT-je may be a second one).
Q: After reading subsystem overview paragraph I am still not sure what are the subsystems of GMT :)! Is it only gcore and spectoolgenerator(See also previous question)? gcore seem like logical subsystems! But what are the others, Workflow?
A: gcore is the subsystem that provides the interface to all the MDA tool components. Workflow should reside withing gcore, because it is the "core" of GMT. Any other subsystems outside gcore should
not have any dependencies to or from any MDA tool components. Examples for other subsystems: one for integrating with the eclipse ide platform, any gmt presentation/UI (how much of that we need depends on whether we need to define workflows withing gmt, or whether we can leverage some open source workflow tool that already has a UI), etc.
Q: Is there compact 3-5 sentance free text description for each subsystem? Now those description are spread through the document.
A: That is already the case in the UML model.
Q: I think in architecture document we should also describe decomposition of gcore itself in more details!
A: Only to a certain point - to clarify the responsibilities of gcore and to define the gcore interface (in the form of Java interfaces with complete signatures). Look at org.eclipse.emf.ecore to see how a good package hierarchy is constructed, i.e. the interfaces that represent the subsystem facade are defined immediately outside the package that implements the subsystem. The nitty-gritty internals of GMT workflow should go into a workflow design document. But we may not even need that much of that if we leverage an external workflow tool.
Q: concept of "ecorewrapper" I believe is a bit out of scope of GMT architecture. Why should GMT care how tool components will implement dependency? For example why should GMT bother how for example GME will implement the integration. We should not care on architecture level if they would do package called ecorewrapper or they will structure their classes any other way. Though, it doesn't mean we should care on political level and not try to help to do this integration.
ecorewrapper package itself will not help plugging the component. I think of bigger interest would be specific interfaces and ways of plugging those components and that should be discussed in architecture document.
A: The package name is not so important, let's just call it <<ecorewrapper>> so that we've got a name to refer to it. The intention of this early version of the document is to draw a line in the sand regarding the dependencies that are permissible. The important message: no dependencies whatsoever from gcore on specific MDA tool components. And no dependencies from MDA tool components on any GMT package beyond gcore. The details of the gcore interface and the requirements on <<ecorewrapper>> packages will come as the next step.
Q: In Figure 1 you mix different levels of packages. I think it is not very good to have eclipse and ecore on the same level. It is not very clear what dependency is this and why is it important to be on the model!
A: the "eclipse" package there just stands for the relevant eclipse platform stuff that serves as the foundation. I have not looked at that yet, so don't take the package name literally.
Q: In Figure 1. What does the yellow box Generative Model Transformer means?
A: It's the top level package that contains gcore, and any other gmt subsystems.
Q: "This architecture keeps GMT focussed on tool component orchestration and on providing the integration with the org.eclipse IDE platform". HOW?
It would be good to see more details.
A: Still to be done, but within the allowable dependencies defined in the architecture document.
Q: Figure 2. Doesn't explain much to me! What I read from this diagram is that all tool components depend on ecore and gcore. It didn't give promised idea of how MDA tool components will hook into GMT platform. What are the interfaces?
A: See above. Patience, we'll get to that. I've seen too many teams get excited about "internal design" and rush into the supposedly "cool" stuff completely forgetting the bigger picture and creating external dependencies on zillions of things.
Q: Figure 3. GMT package is a bit confusing. "examples" are "fuut" are they really ment to be there?
A: These things are part of the complete GMT package, but they are certainly not part of the GMT functionality that a user would typically use. "fuut"
should become just another "MDA tool component" (or two if Ghica wants to keep the visual editor as well).
Q: Now we have Logical View only. Is there any specific reason or is it only time constraint? I would like to see for example mapping with Use Case Model and some kind of implementation view also.
A: Yes, time...Yes we need to relate the use case view to the logical view. The implementation and deployment view are usually not a big deal and can be added as appropriate.
Q: "For this purpose GMT will come equipped with a default set of code generation templates that delivers a web-based specification tool that is suitable for use in a distributed team environment.". Web-based tool doesn't seam for me as remedy for distributed team environment. I don't believe it is possible to develop this in near future.
A: I think you may not yet see what this is about. In a nutshell, in a distributed environment development teams of different subsystems are typically in different locations, however all the modeling artefacts need to be accessible to everyone just like normal source code. A web based application modeling environment greatly eases deployment in a large choatic environment, where developer desktops are not standardised etc. It's actually not such a big deal at all to get a simple version of that working.
Q: Workflow component description is not very well connected now. It would be good to have better description of how workflow fits into GMT.
A: To see what we need from a workflow component we should not theorise, but look at the concrete requirements of "wiring up" oAW to talk to GME via GMT or "wiring up" FUUTje/Velocity to talk to GME via GMT. To be attractive to users the workflow needs to happen as much as possibl behind the scenes, and the user should be working with a "GMT perspective" within Eclipse to launch tools as needed. Again, maybe we don't need a full-blown workflow engine but just the Eclipse plug-in architecture. We can qualify the requirements by mapping out concrete scenarios of the GMT use cases that explicitly refer to oAW, FUUT-je/Velocity, GME, etc. This will lead to concrete worflow requirements, and we use these as the starting point to define the gcore interface(s).
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MarkKofman - 28 Jun 2004