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Introductory Developers
Guide
Background
Cotsec is designed as a framework for allowing a large
system to be developed very quickly, and in a manner
that is comparatively platform-neutral.
Cotsec is driven by the "metadata-driven "
pattern which suggests that if a development process
is repeated frequently that it should be extracted out,
expressed as meta-data with a program generator, and
streamlined.
The generator framework the Cotsec has created is very
flexible, supports template inheritancem and is designed
to be highly flexible through the use of an XML generator
definition file and templates.
Overview of
generator operation
At it's most basic level, the generator framework takes
a context containing variables and a template
that references the variables and produces an output
file. The framework is able to insert the generated
file into other nominated files.
A context can be thought of as a variable table - it
lists variables and their values by name. A template
is a Velocity template that enables the user to insert
variables from the context. For example a template might
be "This is a short template - here's the name
of the form: $classdata.name". $classdata refers
to a variable in-context (.name is a getName() method
within the ClassData object).
Generators
Generators have the responsibility of supplying information
to Contexts and creating some form of output. Typically
this output takes the form of a template with the Context
information merged in. The standard generator will take
the defined context information and generate a set of
single files. It provides a very basic set of GeneratorInfo
to the context factories, and is typically used to output
multiple files from a set of input XML files. A graphical
editor is used to generate the metadata files. The editor
itself has been built with the Cotsec framework.
Template
inheritance
Cotsec supports template inheritance - where a template
that is common to multiple styles (see below), or one
or more generators can be factored out in a similar
manner to that of standard object oriented code.
Styles
Generators support the concept of "styles".
A style is an ability to pick a different template for
generation based on the generator-instructions style
property, allowing the template definer to create a
suite of different looks and feels for different sections
of an application. Styles should not be used to target
completely different environments, but to provide look
and feel changes only. Common functionality to multiple
styles can be factored out using template inheritance.
New
language guide
A New Language Guide
is availabe to help developers new to Cotsec port the
framework to new languages or language frameworks. The
guide covers the development of new generators, templates,
controls and language-metadata - everything required
to create a generator for a new language.
Thus far, previous experience has shown that creating
basic new generators is typically the work of a few
days for one person.
Cotsec API
(Javadoc)
Cotsec provides Javadoc and will also provide source
code to approved users. Please contact
Cotsec for details.
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Javadoc
