Re: ANNOUNCE: Avatox 1.8 is now available

[Martin Krischik <krischik@users.sourceforge.net>]

Marc A. Criley wrote:

> Martin Krischik wrote:
>> Marc A. Criley wrote:
>> 
>>> Avatox (Ada, Via Asis, To Xml) is an application that traverses Ada
>>> compilation units and outputs their ASIS representation(s) as XML
>>> document(s) in the Avatox XML Format, AXF, file extension "axf". The
>>> format of the XML in the document can be configured, and supplemental
>>> source annotations can be generated.
>> 
>> Interesting - I still wonder why not XMI - With XMI we could feed the
>> output into tools like umbrello [2] which would be the first step towards
>> an Ada UML tool with round trip engineering.
> 
> That's a fair question.
> 
> AXF is seen as a first step--First let's get the Ada into a more
> malleable form that can be processed by XML tools and technologies.
> Then it becomes more amenable to content extract and transformation,
> with Avatox generating "AXFPoint" (AXF Points Of INformation for
> Transformation) elements to to assist with transformations by providing
> information beyond that of the basic ASIS-derived semantic information.
> 
> In other words, AXF -> UMI would be easier than Ada -> UMI because
> you've lessened the "impedance mismatch" between the source and target.
>   In addition, if you want to change the way Ada constructs are mapped
> to UMI (or any other target), or if you need to adapt to a revised UMI,
> it's almost always going to be much simpler to alter an XML
> processor--especially if it's stylesheet based--than the Ada-to-XML
> generator.

So:

.adb ==Avatox==> .axf ==XXX==> .xmi ==xmi2code==> .adb

is easier then 

.adb ==Avatox==> .xmi ==xmi2code=> .adb

Only we would need XXX ;-).

Martin

xmi2code: http://xmi2code.sourceforge.net/
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Ada programming at: http://ada.krischik.com