[aosd-announce] Tool Release: Object Teams Devleopment Tooling

[Stephan Herrmann]

Dear All,

We are proud to announce a major new release of the

         Object Teams Development Tooling (OTDT)
                   Version 0.9.17

We assume that most readers of this list are familiar with Object Teams.
A brief description as well as a list of publications can be found on
     http://www.objectteams.org


Why is this release special?
The implementation of the language ObjectTeams/Java (OT/J), which started
out in 2001 as a research prototype, has by this release reached a state
of stability, completeness  and maturity that exceeds the expectations
that any of us had at the start of this project.

Testing:
As of version 0.9.17, the OTDT, which is deeply integrated into the Eclipse JDT,
passes the full Eclipse JUnit testsuite. Additional white box (JUnit) and
black box (JACKS) tests for the specific features of OT/J sum up to over 26,900
successful tests. To be honest, yes, we have 5 failing tests, but these only
represent a few Refactorings which are currently unimplemented for OT/J.
Test results are available via the build notes at
     http://www.objectteams.org/distrib/otdt_buildnotes.html

Eclipse 3.2:
Two days after the Eclipse Callisto release we published our release 0.9.9
which built upon Eclipse 3.2 final. Due to the tight integration of the OTDT
into Eclipse and the JDT this was a larger effort than for tools that are more
loosely coupled to Eclipse, but in return the full power of Eclipse 3.2 is now
available for development with OT/J (including all Java 5 features).

Features:
The OTDT 0.9.17 supports software development with OT/J at various levels:
- Syntax highlighting, semantic highlighting, completion, navigation, search,
   quick fixes are all smoothly integrated with the existing Java support.
- Editor, wizards, outline, type hierarchy are all adapted to correctly treat
   the semantics of OT/J
- Refactoring support respects the new semantic dependencies.
- A Binding Editor for visually defining a "connector", ie., a module
   that declaratively connects two existing modules.
- Fully incremental compilation.
- Transparent integration of the Object Teams Runtime Environment for
   load time aspect weaving.
- Source level debugging.
- An initial metrics plugin (currently supporting some coupling metrics
   specific for OT/J - a report generator will be included shortly).
As a companion project a UML modeler for Object Teams with code generation
exists at this site
     http://swt.cs.tu-berlin.de/~mosconi/otuml/update-site/
     (Documentation about the modeler will be made available shortly).

Getting started:
The OTDT ships with a number of classical examples partly taken directly
from our publications. For a quick overview you should perhaps start with
the StopWatch example. More advanced examples from our demos and tutorials
are also included.
The detailed language definition is integrated both as a help topic as well
as linked to OT/J-specific compiler error messages - it's also on
     http://www.objectteams.org/def/0.9

Self-Appliction:
The OTDT itself is an OT/J application: 5 plugins of this tools are written
in OT/J using our new technology OT/Equinox as an extension of the OSGi
plugin model. An initial report about this technology can be found in
     http://www.objectteams.org/publications/eTX06.pdf

Download:
The OTDT can be downloaded from
     http://www.objectteams.org/distrib/otdt.html
Read-only access to our source code repository (subversion) is via
     http://guest:guest@svn.first.fraunhofer.de/topprax

Community:
Please feel free to join our mailing list on
     http://www.objectteams.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/otj-users

Contributors:
The OTDT has been developed by Andreas Kaiser, Carsten Pfeiffer, Christine
Hering, Christine Hundt, Gregor Brcan, Jan Wloka, Jaroslav Svacina, Joachim
Hänsel, Jürgen Widiker, Karsten Meier, Markus Witte, Michael Krüger, Paul
Häder, Ralf Anklam, Sascha Kolewa and Stephan Herrmann.

The project TOPPrax (www.topprax.de), by which this development became
possible in the first place, is funded by the German Ministry BMBF.
We received valuable feedback about the tool from students and users and
specifically from Dehla Sokenou who is leading our major case study.

Thanks to all for making this real --- see you on www.objectteams.org!
Stephan Herrmann