I wrote an earlier message about "role of EMF in LDT" and tried
to explain to Ted Caroll, what I would see as advantages of using
EMF in LDT. ("Re: Role of EMF in LDT", 06.05.2005)
In the meantime Ed Merks, one of the project leaders of EMF has
mentioned in the thread initated by G. Pothier, that EMF is suited
for the task of representing ASTs language independent, a requirement
for LDT mentioned by Ted.
The advantages I tried to formulate would hold not only for EMF, but
as well for SDO, a standard proposed jointly by BEA and IBM, and which
is using EMF for its reference implementation. David Frankel proposed
to us using SDO for our XML based DSLs, and given that BEA is one of the
authors of SDO it may be a good fit for LDT as well.
In addition to the advantages of EMF, SDO would introduce an abstraction
level for the data source connections, and allow to commit changes to
the ASTs in a transactional way. This may be very useful, given the
scenario that XML based languages are not used like Java in a
traditional development cycle, but as a combination of data and
programs (business rules, e.t.c) which may be entered by various
users in concurrency.
Would it make sense if the LDT team at BEA connects with the SDO team?
As far as I know, the vendors (BEA, IBM, e.t.c) plan in addition to
the open source EMF based SDO implementation as well commercial,
closed source implementations. If LDT is based on SDO, it would as
well allow to exchange the implementation of the AST. LDT could be
used to build
products based on open source or vendor implementations alternatively.
This may make the project more interesting.
Best Regard,
Philipp Kutter