ART - Adaptive Reuse Technique

(This project was previously residing at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vclang)

ART is a notation to represent families of similar programs as highly parameterized, adaptable templates, for ease of maintenance and reuse. Typically, a program family comprises program versions that evolved from a single original program as new requirements have been implemented to it over time. Each program version addresses a specific customer segment or platform. Such program versions have much in common, but differ in some user requirements or design/implementation details.

ART provides an end-to-end solution for managing program families that eliminates the need for other mechanisms that are often used for that purpose such as macros or design patterns, and significantly reduces the scope in which we apply configuration management systems.

ART can be also pictured as an advanced template system, where any program structure (not only classes or functions) may become a parameterized template, and where parameters may be just anything we wish – types, program fragments, files or program structures of any kind and size.

For more information on ART visit the ART website: art-processor.org.

ART Source

This repository will contain the source code of ART processor code and grammar definition

ART processor's core code is built in Java, using a parser/lexer generator tool Antlr. The Antlr version used is 3.2. We were using the feature to define grammars to output AST trees and using tree-rewriting. The new Antlr4 has no tree-rewriting and suggest that logic to be moved in the grammar logic's source code instead of grammar syntax definition, so the syntax and code has to be migrated to use the new Antlr version. Help and suggestions on migration are welcome.

Contribute

For developers who are willing to work on the Java base code of ART.

You can use the code as a simple Java project and work on the core code to override, enhance how the ART command will behave.

• Fork the project here. You can use latest Eclipse version and latest JRE. Just open the project.
• You can ignore the package named grammar, the output of the parser/lexer generation is included in the source code in the package named antlr-generated.
• Happy coding!

For developers who are willing to work on ART grammar as well

We have a pre-configured ecplipse with Antlr 3.2 and Antlr eclipse workbench which will help in modifying grammar files and regenerates the antlr-generated grammar code package on every grammar file change.

• dowload eclipse ANTLR (pre-configured for grammar updates) from here.

• Open Eclipse-ART-ANTLR and import this project.

• Once you open a grammar (*.g) file, it will prompt you to select an Antlr package in order to build the grammar. Select Yes, point to the Antlr 3.2 library under the lib folder of this project.

• Make sure the code generation parameters are set: (This should be already set on the project you donwloaded, we just confirm setting here)

  • On imported project:

  • Project Properties -> ANTLR -> Code Generator:

    • Tick "Enable project specific settings",
    • Under "Output Folder" select "Project relative folder" and type: "antlr-generated",
    • Under Java, tick "Append Java package to output folder".
    • Apply. Ok.

    

• Now, once there is a change in any of the (*.g) files and the change is saved, we can see the Antlr compiler's result on the console window and the affected files in the antlr-generated package have been replaced with the newly generated java files from the grammar definition.

• JRE 1.8 will cause an error to pop up, however the parser/lexer code generation is successful. The error can be ignored, or you can run with JRE 1.7, in that case a NPE error will be reported on the Console view.

  • Changing JRE in Eclipse [optional]: Top menu -> Window -> Preferemces -> Java -> Installed JREs -> Add and select 1.7 from your computer

  

  • More about the JRE 1.8 <-> Antlr 3.2 incompatibility issue here

• Happy coding!