This is entirely for Finnish audience; a quick reminder for TechDays 2012 attendees to register your tracks in time.
There are going to be two presentations about ADM. One starting from T4 basics and other demonstrating the architectural level automation.
Register your tracks in time (even if they weren’t the ADM presentations) so that the presentation hall/room sizes can be properly chosen by the organizators.
See you there!
Kalle
We are pushing forward the concept-proto-level complete ecosystem infrastructure for higher level abstraction automation.
The first glimpse of what’s forming up is described in Abstraction Ecosystem Overview under the “This is all open source” section.
What I’m particularly happy about is, that everything is based on well-established open-source technologies and tools, such as Git, GnuPG. Even the database for metadata search is fully open-source and multiplatform command-line usable BaseX XML based database.
The infrastructure is actually only series of command/shell scripts executed in proper sequence, which makes it transparent and clear to understand. All of it open source of course as well.
The polishing up requires likely few weeks, but I wanted to share this much as we’re slowly raising interest on potentially co-operating parties with forming up the infrastructure for ecosystem.
Cheers,
Kalle
After managing to raise encouraging interest in various parties, I’ve focused more on multi-tool support. Especially on Eclipse area, because Eclipse is the major multi-language targeting IDE on open-source area.
Eclipse’s XML Editing Tools (from Web Toolkit)
Eclipse XML Tools
… and normal external tool support
Eclipse External Tools
bring it already to very usable level. I already concept-tested it on Windows with MonoDevelop’s tools and everything worked fine. I’ll make proper section for Eclipse, once I ensure the compatibility and proper workflow on Linux and Mac OS X.
Btw this also applies to Qt Creator 
Happy New Year 2012,
Kalle
I just briefly revisited the absolute proof, to underline that theoretically other Model-Driven-Architecture or Model + Code-Generation approaches are in-line with ADM.
However being able to pull it off in practice many (not necessarily all though) of them lack the closed-system model + generator approach; with no real-world requirements outside the version controlled folder (mainstream tool usage on matured template-technology does not really apply).
I also revisited our dawn of new era statement adding the new paradigm in logical continuity of raising the level of abstraction through programming languages. When this is now achieved in logically pure manner, there is nowhere to go, as there is no “beyond” in this path.
Merry Christmas to all readers,
Kalle
It was back while ago when I realized MonoDevelop is practically compatible with Visual Studio T4. There were few minor incompatibilities with MonoDevelop 2.6 beta at the time, but retesting now with MonoDevelop 2.8.5 there were no compatibility issues at all.
There is still usability differences, but mostly on local and shared abstractions; using modular abstractions (that are demonstrated also in Demo Videos in section Documentation and Status Tracking) the experience on the automation generation side is equal (no surprise there, as the modular abstractions actually require separate build-chain).
Only difference that still matters is that MonoDevelop’s XML editor is not intellisense-aware on attributes nor annotations in form of tooltips. This is likely easy to counter to use some external XML editor for better experience.
Of course modifying modular abstractions still makes Visual Studio shine because of T4 intellisense, but the schema file change is easy to reflect to MonoDevelop with simple command line tool support.
I’ll probably add MonoDevelop-specific videos to reach Mac and Linux developers on the ground more native to them.
Cheers,
Kalle
I was happy to find out the freshly founded Coding For Kids movement.
As those watching us for longer might recall, we’ve also pursued the simplification to the logical extreme (down to the level where anyone could start making applications from their mobile phones). We got somewhat “burned” in our efforts when we pursued on Google’s AppInventor integration, but Google discontinued providing it (although happily MIT took over).
We were re-establishing the connection with MIT as well as with Intel’s AppUp Creator, but as our goal was especially target youngsters or even kids, sharing the common interest lead me to join our efforts with Coding For Kids.
As I’ve already approached the open source community for the open source way of doing, I hope we can finish this and together introduce the world of creating applications and learning to program to kids of various ages.
I already apologize beforehand, as a side note (as it becomes apparent sooner or later) this blog is not entirely kid-safe content. I have a four year old son myself and there is one particular post I wouldn’t want him to read until he understands that not all the things are so pretty in the adult world of social interaction.
This blog is a live-history demonstrating how “disruptive innovation” has built up and while I now understand that some certain post could have been left unsaid, it was metally needed at the time being. Trying to convince your own peers and facing ill-argumented debate of nonsense and downplay made me publish that one. The post after all “only” referates the atmosphere from the “Matrix Reloaded” kind of a revolution, so all-in-all I thought of it being within socially acceptable boundaries. I do understand that the referred artist Marilyn Manson is also an issue, but the quote was there due to “Matrix Reloaded” atmosphere of revolution.
I could have phrased it differently. I could have referred to Dolphins in the “Hitchhikers Guide To Galaxy”; “Your industry is being automated away, and you didn’t bother to listen” – kind of way, but unfortunately I didn’t.
I did think of editing away the post, but the historical facts of the blog were more important. I hope this doesn’t become too big of a problem; after all this blog is not meant to address the “Coding for Kids”, but moreover simply provide the means to achieve it.
All this being said, let’s change some world!
Kalle
I finished up the series of T4 videos. They serve as a solid set for getting started from ground up to the level of what ADM is using. There is plenty of documentation out there for T4 overall; for example the great series of articles by Oleg Sych.
Next I’m going to focus on streamlining the initialization of the abstraction-structure alongside for making abstraction from scratch. For those already using git can test the current one (some minor issues exist though) already. It’s published in github.com/abstractiondev/absInitializer.
Usable with two (ok three) simple commands (that require unzip.exe in path as well):
Cheers,
Kalle
