W3C Technologies Integration in SmartTools

Project Manager: Daniel Dardailler <danield@w3.org>
Authors of this document: Pascal Degenne and Didier Parigot <Didier.Parigot@inria.fr>

Created: 28 August 2002. Last updated: 29 August 2002.

Table of Content:

• Introduction
• Background on SmartTools
• W3C technologies integration
• Deviation from plan

Introduction

This document is a summary of the achievements of project "W3C Technologies Integration in SmartTools".

The goal of this deliverable (and its sub-deliverables) is to adapt and use a programming environment platform originally developed by INRIA, called SmartTools, to migrate to using W3C standards (XML, XML Schema, DOM, Web Services, etc) at every possible level. With such a coherent platform in hand, we can then use it to demonstrate the benefits of building tools based on such standards, in terms of interoperability with Web technologies.

Background on SmartTools

SmartTools is a development environment generator that provides a structure editor and semantic tools as main features. SmartTools is easy to use, thanks to its graphical user interface. Being based on Java and XML technologies offers all the features of SmartTools to any defined language. The main goal of this tool is to provide help and support for designing software development environments for programming languages as well as domain-specific languages defined with XML technologies.

In its current form, SmartTools can take a language grammar, and

• build syntax trees for that language
• perform semantic analysis on such trees
• apply tree transformations
• display the trees in different text or graphic formats

W3C technologies integration

The work would consist of:

• Adding XML Schema support: currently SmartTools only takes DTD format as input. This deliverable would add support for XML Schemas.
• XSL transformations: Development of a simple pattern matching and transformation language on top of XSLT. The goal is to simplify the XSLT syntax and shows its less known capability.
• Design the main modules of the SmartTools platform in the form of Web Services that would support the WSDL and SOAP protocols (their W3C developed version that is).

• extension of the abstract syntax tree (AST) to support more XML formalisms and accept XML Schema format as input.
• broader use of XML technologies for user interface design
• uniform visualization/transformation model to apply at every possible level.
• more modular architecture based on components to support the Web Services

Support more XML formalisms

To support and describe more XML formalisms we need to:

• Extend our AST formalism with more complex elements.
• Evolve our implementation to use DOM Level2 API.
• Define a new Abstract Tree API to support strong typing capability.
• Adapt our DTD transformation to this new AST formalism.
• Adapt our semantic tools (visitor design pattern) for those extensions.

XML Schema

To accept XML schemas as input, a Schema transformation towards a canomic form (basic Schema) was defined. This transformation is very similar to our DTD transformation. An environment to support XML Schema as input, is under development, it will contain an implementation of this transformation.

Generic graphical user interface

To obtain a very flexible tool and make the generation of varied environments easier, all graphical and user interface designs are based on a uniform transformation model (document/view) which is in conformity with the W3C specifications. For example, the graphical user interface is only one a particular graphical view of a document (in XML format) which describes the various files or tools to be opened.

The results of this approach are:

• a more frequent usage of standard resources formats such as CSS
• very fast construction of new environments (some of which are used for the visualization/edition of our own configuration files)
• the personalization and configuration of the produced users interfaces only come from an XML description file. Writing source code is not any more necessary.

XSL transformations

Our uniform transformation model is strongly based on XSL transformations. To simplify this stage, a new environment was built using the SmartTools systems. It allows manipulation/edition of these transformations thanks to various syntaxes (views) that are more readable than XSLT syntax.

Modular architecture

To obtain a more modular architecture a component model was defined that answers the needs of the SmartTools platform. This model is based on XML descriptions of the functionalities of each SmartTools component. For this purpose various tools were created. In particular a container generator which uses a component's description to produce automaticaly an implementation of that component's interface.

The advantages and results of this new architecture are:

• SmartTools components communicate with each other directly and can be used as standalone components
• for users, it automates all tasks to build a new environment
• for each environment, it produces an easily exportable component in form of java a package (jar file)
• strongly reduced size of the core system (generic parts)

This component model is under validation in the current version and still requires some developments to complete this work.

Web Services

By transformation of our XML component descriptions into equivalent WDSL descriptions, this new architecture allows to see the SmartTools modules in the form of Web Services. In order to help using these possibilities, a set of tools was created, named CDTools (Component Description Tools). Those tools convert the component's description to a WSDL description for Web Services. For example, thanks to those tools, our graph component was automatically transformed into a Web Services component.

Deviations from plan