Guest Book

Program-Transformation.Org: The Program Transformation Wiki
You can use this page to give your opinions on this Wiki: tell us what you think!


The ReengineeringWiki is rather incomplete and biased towards the current users. This will always be the case.

However, anyone is invited to join and add subjects of interest to him or her.


Viewing ReverseEngineering as ProgramTransformation feels a bit odd.

Indeed, I hesitated a bit in putting it under the http://www.program-transformation.org/ umbrella. However, there is so much in common, and there were already so many program transformation pages, that I felt it was a shame not to take advantage of these.

Moreover, it's not that strange. HelmutPartsch, for example, sees ForwardEngineering as a series of transformations between programs. He starts with a high-level specification, which gradually is transformed into executable code. ReverseEngineering then really is the reverse of this process: a series of transformations on program representations in order to find the most abstract one.

This is, in fact, also the point of view taken by, for example IraBaxter's DMS%20Toolkit approach, and JimNeighbors' Draco approach.

--ArieVanDeursen


Very short pages, with just a name, a one line description, and a URL tend not be very useful -- if you want such info you might as well want to "google it up".

Nevertheless, there can be good reasons to create such very short pages:

  • As an "invitation" to discuss, or share experience with the actual use of the topic / concept / paper / tool etc.
  • As a convenience to the reader, providing up-to-date URLs
  • As a way to eliminate too many questionmarks

--ArieVanDeursen


The current wiki technology used is not very strong:

  • The titles could be "unconcatenated", in order to get better readability and search engine results
  • The wiki doesn't support file "attachements"
  • Searching gets slower and slower
  • The list WebChanges could perhaps be split into smaller chunks
  • Other Wiki's use cookies to find out that ArieVanDeursen is editing rather than galjas.cwi.nl -- that can be quite nice.
  • Editing pages and waiting for the reload takes too long (but not waiting might kill the cvs action LeonMoonen mentioned)
    • we might use the cron to put things under CVS regularly
    • we might use the cron to compute the backlinks rather than using the webserver (this means they won't be effective immediately).
  • The use of frames annoyingly interferes with bookmarking pages of interest.
    • If we use frames, they must be wiki-editable
    • The titlebar frame and the left frame overlap in data
    • I'd prefer generating wiki pages with default two buttons on the top, one for the entrypoint, and one for program-transformation.org. (and perhaps some buttons on the bottom for wiki-related stuff such as editing, searching, adding, ...)
  • The webserver used for running the wiki is a local one running on CWI machine vanille port 8080. I think it's better to have it run on a more regular CWI htbin directory (www.cwi.nl/htbin/<user>/)

I would rather have a Java-based fully OpenSource wiki which of all us can modify if we want to.

--ArieVanDeursen


Maybe it is time for WikiRenovation then. -- EelcoVisser


The transition to Twiki has resolved many of these issues: the only open one is that bookmarking through program-transformation.org is not yet possible (such URLs point to the losser instead). Eelco is sorting this out and has a solution.

-- ArieVanDeursen -- 04 Apr 2001


The distinction between the subwebs is not immediately clear.
  • There seems to be potential overlap between the Tools and the Transform web in particular.
  • The migration from vanille to the splitted subwebs has created several broken links
I'm in favor of merging the subwebs together: the various entry points can then easily share information.

-- ArieVanDeursen - 25 Apr 2001

I'm not in favour. Sharing of information is easy enough and is already being done. Whenever you want to refer to ProgramTransformation in the Stratego or Tools web, write Transform.ProgramTransformation. Topics in the Tools web are different in nature from topics in the Transform web. But something needs to be done about visualization of the site structure. For instance, generating a graph picture showing relations between (a selection of) the pages.

-- EelcoVisser - 14 Oct 2001


It would be nice to see how mature a particular page is. This could be a color coding / icon attached to a link, so that you can decide whether to visit this page or not.

This would require some technical Twiki modification, though..

-- ChrisVerhoef & ArieVanDeursen, dierendag 2001.


I would like to get automatic notification of changes to page I contributed to.

-- PeggyStorey

You can get daily notification of changes to a web by putting your name and email address on the WebNotify page. Notifications are sent out on a daily basis.

-- EelcoVisser - 14 Oct 2001

What's meant here is not an (almost daily) message with all pages that are changed, but just message for those pages that were once in their history edited by the subscribing person (a more refined notification) -- ArieVanDeursen. - 14 Oct 2001

Yes, I understood that, but just thought it would be good to point out the WebNotify possibility, which I find a useful way of keeping track of what is going on at the wiki. -- EelcoVisser - 15 Oct 2001

It's not ideal, but I just check the Transform Changes link every couple of days. I run my eye down the topic names, looking for topics that I have contributed to, or of course any topics of interest. It's a sort of "automatic what's new". Every now and then, you will find just a cosmetic change, but if you have the time, it's not a bad technique. -- MikeVanEmmerik - 30 Dec 2001


I find the preferences, variables etc. a bit complicated. Well, I just don't get it. ;-) I would prefer more simplicity like in the original Wiki at c2.com.

Something is missing! There are no typical ThreadMode (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ThreadMode) dicusssions here!? What to do about it?

-- FrankGerhardt?

You don't have to use any of the more complicated stuff. -- EelcoVisser

Twiki has many bells and whistles that are distracting -- I'd like to get rid of them -- ArieVanDeursen.

ThreadMode isn't used much yet since the community is still rather small. ArieVanDeursen and EelcoVisser have been the main contributors until now. But this page is starting to look like it is in ThreadMode. It might even be time to split of some topics from this page. -- EelcoVisser - 14 Oct 2001

Many pages have a survey-like character. This makes it a bit difficult to disagree with the contents, making ThreadMode less likely. I think it would be nicer to have more personal / opiniated pages as well -- ArieVanDeursen - 14 Oct 2001


The Main web (Main) of this twiki was intended for discussions on HouseKeeping? matters. How about moving the topics on this page there?

-- EelcoVisser - 14 Oct 2001


CategoryWiki

Transform.GuestBook moved from Transform.RoadmapCriticisms on 29 Dec 2001 - 12:49 by ArieVanDeursen - put it back