| RE: [mylar-dev] Integrating Mylar with Protege |
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The plug-in to look at for determining the feasibility of this is org.eclipse.mylar.core. If you inspect org.ecipse.mylar.core.tests.ContextTest you will notice that it runs as a regular JUnit test, and uses on the MylarContext and related classes which are not coupled to Eclipse at all. However, the bloated MylarContextManager encapsulates the additional semantics of working with interest, and it does have some coupling to eclipse.ui, as do the structure bridges. The monitoring stuff (e.g. AbstractInteractionMonitor) is coupled to eclipse.ui, but it’s straightforward enough that you can probably just ignore it and replicate some of that functionality. Likewise I think that you will need to ignore everything outside of mylar.core because it is tightly coupled to Eclipse classes.
What I suggest doing is coming up with a proposal and bug report for how you would like MylarContextManager to be decoupled from eclipse.ui, and if/how you would like to use structure bridges. If there is a clear split that’s straightforward to make in a behavior-preserving way then it should be fairly straightforward for you to contribute an Ant build script which packages up the relevant mylar.core classes as a JAR that can be used by your Prefuse tool.
Another thing to think about is whether it would make sense for you to reuse the MylarPlugin infrastructure by doing this integration via a custom OSGi framework. Way back I had a somewhat similar task of making the JDT-based AspectJ compiler run on the command line (it’s coupled to jdt.core and eclipse.resources), and did this by introducing a façade that simulated a workspace by bridging directly to the filesystem, but ensuring that the plug-in architecture was not used. You might be able to try something similar while using only the parts of the plug-in architecture that you need. But this approach would definitely be overkill for a proof-of-concept.
Mik
From:
mylar-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:mylar-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Chris Callendar
Hi Mik,
I am looking into integrating Mylar with Protege (http://protege.stanford.edu - a free open source ontology editor). Protege has a somewhat similar layout to Eclipse - tree controls for navigating classes, instances, slots, etc. My first objective is to be able to monitor Protege users navigating these trees and lists to build up a context model and to allow them to filter the ontologies.
One problem is that Protege is written in Swing. It would be ideal if I could somehow use just the Mylar core functionality with out the dependency on SWT and other Eclipse jars. And since the Mylar Monitor is heavily tied to SWT I expect to have to write some new monitors for Swing.
Also, since there are about 16 Mylar subprojects, could you very briefly describe the important ones (what their purpose is)? Or the ones that you think might be useful for my task of integrating Mylar with Protege.
Thanks very much. Chris Callendar |