[TYPO3-mvc] Modelling Editor Eclipse for FLOW3/ExtBase

[Stephan Petzl]

Interesting topic! i was thinking about model driven developement & 
extbase a lot the last days, cause i am currently learning for the 
"model engineering" exam on thursday.
We had some practical exercise this semester as well, which consisted of 
3 parts:

1.) we defined a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for MVC WebApplications 
(DSL==Metamodel). This language consists of everything you will need for 
a webapp but not more (e.g. "Entity", "Relation", "Attribute" for the 
DataModel and "Controller", "ListView", "EditView", "Subcontroller", 
"Link", ... for the representation- and routing model.)

2.) we generated a editor plugin for Eclipse (out of the Metamodel), 
which allows you to construct a model representing a concrete 
webapplication. Its far more simple than you might think! After 
generating the editor plugin we modelled a course-administration-app 
(Courses, Professors, Exams,...) in a graphical editor (its like drawing 
UML diagrams). No need to write code at all, so far.

3.) we generated 100% of the code for a Java MVC webapp. We defined 
templates in the language XPAND. Basically it works like any other 
templating system: You write html (and jsp) code and add some markers 
here and there, which will be substituted with dynamic data at a later 
point.
We generated JSP Views, Controllers, Data Access Objects, Models with 
annotation for Hibernate-Persistance, a menu for navigation, and even 
some test stubs.


The great thing about the whole thing is, that its not about Java, you 
can generate source for every type of language this way.
Even if we are developing a kickstarter which is not eclipse-based, i 
think it would be a good idea to use standards which are already there. 
e.g. for model-storage i think we could use XMI (which can be loaded in 
eclipse as well) instead of a proprietary JSON object model.

BR Stephan



Jonas Dübi schrieb:
> Hi everybody
> 
> Do you think this could be used for FLOW3/ExtBase?
> http://www.heise.de/developer/artikel/Modellgetriebene-Softwareentwicklung-mit-EMF-und-Xtext-912436.html 
> 
> (In english: http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/)
> 
> Best regards
> Jonas
> 
> PS: We're in the middle of the development for a big software with 
> ExtBase right now. It's great! Of course it has still a lot of points to 
> improve, but it can be used productive...


-- 
Best Regards
Stephan Petzl