A code generation framework for the ALMA common software

Nicolás Troncoso; Horst H. von Brand; Jorge Ibsen; Matias Mora; Victor Gonzalez; Gianluca Chiozzi; Bogdan Jeram; Heiko Sommer; Gabriel Zamora; Alexis Tejeda

doi:10.1117/12.857039

19 July 2010 A code generation framework for the ALMA common software

Nicolás Troncoso, Horst H. von Brand, Jorge Ibsen, Matias Mora, Victor Gonzalez, Gianluca Chiozzi, Bogdan Jeram, Heiko Sommer, Gabriel Zamora, Alexis Tejeda

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 7740, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy; 774039 (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857039
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2010, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Code generation helps in smoothing the learning curve of a complex application framework and in reducing the number of Lines Of Code (LOC) that a developer needs to craft. The ALMA Common Software (ACS) has adopted code generation in specific areas, but we are now exploiting the more comprehensive approach of Model Driven code generation to transform directly an UML Model into a full implementation in the ACS framework. This approach makes it easier for newcomers to grasp the principles of the framework. Moreover, a lower handcrafted LOC reduces the error rate. Additional benefits achieved by model driven code generation are: software reuse, implicit application of design patterns and automatic tests generation. A model driven approach to design makes it also possible using the same model with different frameworks, by generating for different targets. The generation framework presented in this paper uses openArchitectureWare1 as the model to text translator. OpenArchitectureWare provides a powerful functional language that makes this easier to implement the correct mapping of data types, the main difficulty encountered in the translation process. The output is an ACS application readily usable by the developer, including the necessary deployment configuration, thus minimizing any configuration burden during testing. The specific application code is implemented by extending generated classes. Therefore, generated and manually crafted code are kept apart, simplifying the code generation process and aiding the developers by keeping a clean logical separation between the two. Our first results show that code generation improves dramatically the code productivity.

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Nicolás Troncoso, Horst H. von Brand, Jorge Ibsen, Matias Mora, Victor Gonzalez, Gianluca Chiozzi, Bogdan Jeram, Heiko Sommer, Gabriel Zamora, and Alexis Tejeda "A code generation framework for the ALMA common software", Proc. SPIE 7740, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy, 774039 (19 July 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857039

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