Monday 11 January 2010

Week 1 of 2010

Happy New Year everyone. We have still got plenty of snow here in Colchester which is unusual. I'm also just recovering from a stinky cold which I probably picked up in the Costa coffee shop I like to chill out in. I had hoped to be productive over the Christmas period which so didn't happen. Instead, I've read lots of novels. English TV is always full of repeats and rubbish during Christmas. Although one of my favourite BBC shows Being Human has just started a new series.

I need to get my priorities straight this year and ensure that I deliver working code generation in OOA Tool. My biggest problem will be motivation since I have been working on the project for a full 3 years now by myself. Many features (and technical notes) were left unreleased last year because I failed to finish off the features in a releasable form. This must not continue this year. I have decided to allocate another full year to the project. However, after next year I will probably return to mainstream consulting/development for a break and to shore up my finances. The project will still continue part-time after that. I have no doubts about the overall goals and objectives of the project. However, getting other people to participate in the project has been incredibly difficult. I hope more people will contact me this year with a view to contributing or sharing models etc. Drop me an email if you want to get involved.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You write, that "getting other people to participate in the project has been incredibly difficult".

One reason might be that your project is not open source.

Another reason might be, that you seem to be re-inventing many things which already exist, for example in Eclipse EMF and related projects.

Just wondering: have you ever thought of making your project part of the Eclipse ecosystem?

Sean Kavanagh said...

All of the specifications and interfaces are open. Only OOA Tool is not and I would like to encourage others to create their own compatible tools.

The Eclipse EMF is based on the UML 2 metamodel and OOA10 is based on a Shlaer-Mellor metamodel with a mapping to UML 2. This is a major difference. I don't ever plan to support all of the junk and incompatibilities in the full UML standard. I'm only interested in the Executable UML profile and pure model-to-code transformations.

I have though about making OOA Tool into an Eclipse plugin but I am too far behind in core development to get sidetracked into such an endeavour.