Re: ANNOUNCE: Avatox 1.8 is now available

["Marc A. Criley" <mcNOSPAM@mckae.com>]

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.

-- Marc A. Criley
-- McKae Technologies
-- www.mckae.com
-- Avatox - DTraq - XIA - XML EZ Out