[jboss-dev] Apologize (was Usecase xml ...)

[Adrian Brock]

On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 01:20 -0500, Ke Jin wrote:
> On Thu Nov 15 12:43:18 EST 2007, Adrian wrote:
> > I saw somebody just "discovered the idea" and called it
> > the high sounding title "Domain Specific Modelling for IOC"
> > http://www.pocomatic.com/docs/whitepapers/dsm/
> > 
> > Except it uses xslt, yuck!
> > We've being doing that with our datasources for 4 years. :-)
> 
> Adrian, it is my article.
> 
> Firstly, I apologize that my article wasted your precious time.
> 

Not really. I've been advocating the idea (if not your solution)
for some time now. :-)

> Secondly, I never claimed this was a "just discovered idea", not even the word "discovered". 
> Instead, I put it very clear that this is similar to the C++ #define marco or Lisp defmacro expression. Both of them have been used for decades. Even exactly within the area of IoC frameworks, I knew JICE has already supported the similar thing for years. Even for ourselves, our first implementation supporting this model transformation on top of a third party Java IoC container (either Spring or JBoss Microcontainer) was released a year ago (PocoCapsule for Java, Sept-25 2006). If we intended to claim this as a "just discovered idea", we would have claimed it last year instead of waiting almost 14 months. Therefore, in the TSS news post (most people found my article from thsi post), I used the term "plain-old" to describe this approach, instead of a "just discovered idea". 
> 

Yep. I've never liked preprocessors, they allow too many hacks
and don't catch the unintentional ones (i.e. bugs). 

Hence my "YUCK" :-)

> Thirdly, for the title, it is "DSM *in* IoC", not *for* IoC. I think this title precisely points out what this scenario is really about, what vision I intend to emphasize (namely "domain-specific modeling"), what opinion I have on the "annotation vs XML" issue, and also where we go beyond our predecessors'. We do not stop at using this approach as merely a configuration simplification method (as in JICE) or migration method (as BEA's jboss descriptors to weblogic migration tool) or a code generation tools (as many CASE or DSM design tools). Please read the discussion/examples of "framework of frameworks" in my article. Certainly, I would like to hear your suggestion on what would be an appropriate title.
> 

If you read my posts regularly, you'll know I hate names.
Ideas are much more important.

DSM appears to make it sound more complicated than it is.
Hence my name "use case" configuration.

But like I said, I don't really care what you call it. :-)

> Fourthly, for using the XSLT, please read my post and article closely (pay attention to "higher order transformation"). The XSLT is just used as the core schema for model transformation, because it is standardized and ubiquitous (therefore, would be easy for third party support). None-XSLT transformation stylesheet schema can certainly be supported, and already supported by PocoCapsule for C++. 
> 

The problem for me is that the XSLT (or similar approaches) 
looses what the user actually configures.
i.e. for programmatic deployment, error reporting 
or if they want to change the model dynamically.

e.g. In our datasource that uses XSLT it is impossible to do:

DataSourceModel dsm = new DataSourceModel(); // pun intended :-)
dsm.setPoolSize(20);
deploy(dsm);

// Later - oops need to xslt, etc.
dsm.setPoolSize(40);

You pretty much have to recreate the whole thing
because of implementation details. :-(

> Sincerely,
> Ke
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Adrian Brock
Chief Scientist
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
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