#document model

Web Experience Factory is a pretty good tool for rapid development, but its designer lacks automated documentation that can be used to explain an application to a new developer. Models can get extremely complicated, especially when they're assembled by developers who are just starting to use the tool. This article describes how graphs can be generated using eclipse. Using an Eclipse Plugin to Generate Graphs I've worked with projects that, in some cases, imported dozens of other models, making it quite challenging to follow a sequence of events. About a year ago I had the idea of generating a graph showing how models are imported into each other, but quickly got lost in the details of graphing within eclipse. I recently stumbled on an open source application named Graphviz, and when I saw the simplicity of using a DOT file to describe a graph, I was able to quickly develop a plugin to inspect a WEF model and produce a graph of it. An easy candidate for a graph is tracing how models import other models. The plugin does this by recursively traversing the import builders in each model, producing a graph similar to this example.

Once I figured that out, I was able to add some more to the plugin, producing a graph of service consumer operation calls like the one below. This graph indicates that model_4 contains an action list builder named alTest that invokes the doSomeOperation operation exposed by the service consumer builder named svcConsumer.

The graph of action list calls (builders which invoke action lists) is very similar to the one above, except the target node is an action list instead of a service operation. After the plugin is installed by following these instructions, you will see the following submenu when right clicking on a model.

XML Processing with Python: Part Three

In the previous article, we discussed the Document Type Definition (DTD) language. In this article, we will discuss Schema and XPath.

XML Processing with Python: Schema

Schema was designed to address some of the limitations of DTDs and provide a more sophisticated XML-based language for describing document models. It enables you to cleanly specify numeric models for content, describe character…

Lion is far more than just new user interface features. Apple have fundamentally rethought the human computer interaction at a much deeper level. There are radical changes to the nearly thirty year old document model and quite fundamental changes to the human interaction with the process model.

Applications without processes. Processes without applications. Did Lion just blow your mind?

These are very impressive, significant shifts.