Re: About contributing to jpatterns and similar projects.
Dr Heinz M. Kabutz
It is great that people are finding out about our little project. We
were actually talking on the discussion group about how we should test
the patterns and your verification could be one way to do it.
My views on how I would like to use these annotations is slightly
different. I don't want to force people to implement patterns in a
certain way, but rather offer programmers a way to document their
intentions. Each pattern has so many implementation variations that you
firstly cannot determine what a pattern is by just looking at the
structure of the code. Which means that you also cannot verify that it
was implemented correctly.
I will have a look at your approach and see where we can merge and
improve both projects. We have not mentioned licensing on our website
yet, but I think we were thinking of Apache 2.0 as well.
I will also read the paper you sent and hopefully draw some inspiration
from it.
Please join the jpatterns discussion group when you get a chance - and
welcome to the group: http://groups.google.com/group/jpatterns
Regards
Heinz
--
Dr Heinz M. Kabutz (PhD CompSci)
Author of "The Java(tm) Specialists' Newsletter"
Sun Java Champion
http://www.javaspecialists.eu
Tel: +30 69 72 850 460
Skype: kabutz
On 9/3/10 10:19 AM, Nabeel Siddiqui wrote:
> Hi Heinz Kabutz
> I read about jpatterns (http://github.com/jexp/jpatterns) in your
> response to the question at
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/127411/java-annotations-for-design-patterns.
> Interestingly I was also working on a project effective-annotations
> (http://code.google.com/p/effective-annotations/) about 5 months ago
> but haven't been able to devote time to it lately. Its very similar in
> intent and purpose to your project. You can have a look at it and
> checkout the code from the svn repository. Its open source with Apache
> 2.0 license.
> After comparing your project with mine, I discovered a lot of
> similarities. I also think that your structure and approach are better
> and you are also more active. However one area in which I differed was
> that I tried to make the annotations a means of formal verification of
> design patterns. I tried to follow the approach outlined in the paper
> "Preserving Design Patterns using Source Code Annotations"
> (http://electroinf.uoradea.ro/reviste%20CSCS/documente/JCSCS_2009/Articole_pdf_JCSCS_C_nr_1/JCSCS_2009_Nr_1_CS_Sabo_Preserving.pdf).
> The link to this paper is also on the project site.
> If you look at the code of the annotations for GOF patterns in
> effective-annotations, you will see constraints defined in a customary
> DSL that was first mentioned in this paper. I intended to define such
> constraints for other patterns in the project as well. I think we can
> verify the structure of many design patterns using these constraints.
> I was hoping to write an annotation processor that will analyze the
> source code for design patterns, will verify their structure and emit
> compile time warnings or errors if the structure of a pattern is not
> correct. This will help the developers in the usage of patterns in
> their source code.
>
> I was wondering if you concur with the approach taken in the research
> paper (and implemented partially in effective-annotations) would it be
> possible to merge the two projects together. I have forked your
> project at Github and would be happy to contribute to it in any way I can.
>
> Please let me know about your thoughts about the paper and
> effective-annotations.
>
> Thanks a lot for jpatterns and your very informative newsletter and
> best of luck for Devoxx 2010.
>
> Regards
> Nabeel Mukhtar