Article: Pengukuhan Pustakawan Utama - Pustakawan Dituntut Lebih Profesional

There is an article about National Library Indonesia: Librarians in Indonesia should be more professional in their work. Check out this important article below:

Article about Pustakawan Utama.

Cheers,
Lofi.

MDSD/MDA Frameworks: AndroMDA Cartridges vs. Sculptor

It's quite amazing to see the same things happen again and again... Reinventing the wheel seems is the way in computer science to make things better ;-)

To begin this blog with, which is a comment of the discussion in TSS about Sculptor: The idea of Sculptor is not new, also ArchitectureWare is not new... MDA/MDSD is not new as well...

Here are my opinions about Sculptor and AndoMDA and general about MDSD/MDA:

(1) I'm a very satisfied user of AndroMDA. AndroMDA is a very good framework for MDSD/MDA and is just comparable with ArchitectureWare. The latter is the framework in which Sculptor is written.

(2) Sculptor is comparable with AndroMDA Cartridges, which allow you to generate codes for its reference architecture. AndroMDA offers a lot of production-ready cartridges like:

• Java (general purpose)
• EJB, Spring, jBPM (business layer)
• Struts, JSF (presentation layer)
• ...
• And also for .NET!
  

All these cartridges are already available since more than 3 years! So they are quite mature.

Here is a very good description of the reference architecture in AndroMDA Cartridges for Java and here is for .NET reference architecture. And here are two articles about why using AndroMDA is the way to go.

(3) The difference between AndroMDA Cartridges and Sculptor is that AndroMDA Cartridges use UML as its DSL. Sculptor seems to invent its own text-based DSL. This would be a very interesting point to discuss. My questions here is: why using a new text-based DSL for implementing business applications? For this purpose UML is the way to go. Why? Because:

• We have a lot of good UML tools.
• A lot of people (also business people) understand UML (or a part of UML). If you are using a text-oriented DSL you will loose the capability to talk with the business people.
• How is the quality of the editor for Sculptor DSL? I see a lot of good DSL but almost all of them have a poor editor support. See my blog about Groovy and unit testing.
• In my experience with DSL using ANTLR it is not easy to design a clean DSL. It is very difficult to draw the line where you should stop putting more elements in your DSL. Typical problem: should I put String operations in my DSL? In the long term you will mimic the "lower" language.
• Using UML and its extension mechanism (stereotype, tagged values, etc.) are mostly enough to handle all your requirements in business application development.
  

(4) The quality of the generated codes is the important part of choosing such a framework like AndroMDA Cartridges or Sculptor, since it will determine the quality of your application architecture:

• How many developers have used and reviewed the cartridges and the generated codes?
• How is the generality of the architecture? Will it fit for your needs?
• Do I need to extend, change or rewrite the cartridges?
  

One thing for sure, you HAVE TO REUSE the cartridges to become productive. Changing or rewritting them make NO SENSE for a small team! I have experienced this again and again... Check out my older blog about this phenomenon. So you have to be able to add your requirements to the development of the cartridges and this means that the development team in the cartridge project should not consist a single developer!

In my experience I can say that AndroMDA has a very good support. A LOT of developers have tried and used their cartridges. The development of AndroMDA cartridges is a real Open Source development and those AndroMDA developers are very active!

Cheers,
Lofi.

FTP Server in Java (and of course Open Source ;-))

Here are some interesting FTP servers written in Java and Open Source:

• AnomicFTPServer
• ColoradoFTP
• JavaSecureFTPd
• Apache FTP Server
• FTPGo Server
  

A list of available FTP servers (not only Open Source and Java) can be found in these sites:

• Answer.com FTP Servers
• JavaTips.org
  

It would be nice to have a complete comparison between all those available products because at the end you would only choose one product!

Cheers,
Lofi.