ABSE & AtomWeaver Community

We have just made public a document that outlines AtomWeaver’s demonstration in the Language Workbench Challenge 2012. It’s still a draft, so it will be updated in the coming days, but has enough information about how AtomWeaver solves the challenge’s assignment.

See the AtomWeaver submission document here.

The Language Workbench Challenge 2012 is part of the Code Generation Conference 2012, held in Cambridge. The assignment consists of developing a Domain-Specific Language (i.e. metamodel) and a generator that allows a domain expert to describe the central heating system as a Piping & Instrumentation system.

We will be showing our solution live on the challenge session, to be held the day before the conference. You can still buy a ticket to watch!

A small, maintenance release of AtomWeaver is now available. This version fixes a problem with global variables, and adds icons on the variable lists of Atom property boxes, so that you can easily know the type of each variable.

Upgrade is easy as you can uninstall the old version without removing your work folder. Download the new version at the usual location.

Finally, after almost seven months of work, we’re very happy to announce that AtomWeaver 1.3 is ready.

This landmark version brings many corrections and lot of new features to the IDE:

- Projects are now better organized in multiple folders;
- A new Template wizard that helps you configure your Atom Templates;
- Better error handling;
- Better tree manipulation including moving Atoms around (but respecting construction constraints);
- Sub-folder support on the code generator;
- Copy and paste Atoms;
- Find Atoms by multiple criteria and build a list with the results;
- Much better documentation;
- Better overall stability.

These are the most important, but there are others. We strongly recommend you to upgrade!

Included in the installation package is a new tutorial and a new sample project.

In parallel, ABSE has been revised to 1.1 and its most notable change is the embedded variable symbol that changes from “$” to “@”. We have studied all of the most used programming languages and found that the “@” symbol is the least used one. Switching to this symbol will help reduce the use of escape sequences that would be troublesome in some languages, specially PHP.

Also, a new command has been added to ABSE: oparent() lets you directly access the original parent of a relocated Atom Instance.

You can download the new version in the usual place.

ABSE and AtomWeaver will be participating in the Language Workbench Challenge (LWC2012), held in conjunction with the Code Generation Conference, in Cambridge (see the event page here) in the last week of March. Registration for the LWC 2012 runs through the Code Generation web site. There are still some tickets available.

This year’s assignment is harder than last year’s which was more a presentation of tool capabilities for a generic set of problems. In this edition of the LWC, participant workbenches will have to apply MDSD in a non-software domain: Piping & Instrumentation.

Each participant will have to develop a DSL and generator that allows a domain expert to describe the central heating system as a Piping & Instrumentation system, describing the required functionality with behavior and constraints. The workbench should generate as much as possible of the control software and, if possible, generate a simulation of the central heating system. Quite a challenge! Still, the focus is on capabilities of tooling and not on the domain itself.

If you are into embedded development, or just want to see a live comparison of several DSL/MDD tools, including AtomWeaver, attend the LWC event, on March 27!

We have finally migrated from TikiWikiCMS and left its constant woes behind. We now have WordPress, bbPress and BuddyPress running under the hood!

We hope that the new upgrade will bring a new, more modern experience to all our ABSE and AtomWeaver fans. Register yourself, join the community, and enjoy!

We have the pleasure to announce that version 1.2.2 of the AtomWeaver IDE has just been released.

The most important new feature is the possibility to create new kinds of Auto-Generated Atom Instances: You can now create Auto-Generated Instances that can be edited, moved, and be independent of its creator Template. In addition, you can create regular Instances under Auto-Generated Instances.

Other additions to this new release are:

• Auto-Generated Instance Masters can now link to other Auto-Generated Atoms under the same Template.
• Removed parameters from a Template now put the corresponding Instance variables in an orphan state so that their values are preserved for later reuse.
• New visual aids in Atom Instance labels help you understand special Atom behaviors: For instance, the “<>” symbol denotes a relocated Atom, “[]” denotes a blocked Atom, and “>n<” shows how many Atoms are referencing it.

Also, some bugs were ironed out.

You can download this new version at the usual location.

After more than two months after the last release, a new, more extensive release comes around. More than 30 changes were included in this release, between corrections and enhancements.

Noteworthy enhancements are:

• On the Log module, messages have been visually enhanced for better understanding. In addition, you can now jump to the Atom Template or Instance that originated the error by means of a pop-up menu.
• General usability has been enhanced by adding creation commands directly on pop-up menus, including keyboard shortcuts for most common operations.
• On the Files module you now have the possibility to jump to the Atom Instance that generated a particular source line. Full traceability is now becoming a reality!

Download at the usual place, and enjoy the new release!

Last week we released a new AtomWeaver version. This minor release revolved around the Log module: Logs can be saved, and log entries can be copied to the clipboard for easier bug reporting .

Also, a new log has been created: The Interpreter log. AtomWeaver has two Lua engines: One to maintain a live ABSE model on your workspace, and another to generate code. This new log will separate messages issued by these two Lua engines and facilitate their understanding.

Additionally, the new Global Variables dialog lets you see what global variables have been set on the currently selected model tree.

You can download this version at the AtomWeaver site, http://www.atomweaver.com/download

We are pleased to announce that AtomWeaver version 1.1.1 has been released. With this new version we complete the implementation of the ABSE v1.0 specification.

The last bits from the spec to be implemented were the two special forms of file sections: unique and common. Unique-type sections have the distinct behavior of only accepting lines that are different from those already on the section. If you try to add a line that is a duplicate of another, it will be silently ignored; Common-type sections have the distinct behavior of sharing its contents with other common-type sections on the same file. If you add a line to this section, it will be replicated to all common-type sections in that file.

The ABSE specification itself has changed a bit to accomodate the inclusion of a Vendor ID on an Atom Library: With the Vendor ID, libraries with similar prefixes, but from different sources, can be distinguished.

Apart from other small-scale usability enhancements, an Icon Manager was added. This manager (presently it’s more like just a viewer) will help you see what icons are available to be used on your Atoms.

You can download the latest version at the usual place: http://www.atomweaver.com/download

September 13 marks the start of a new era in software engineering: ABSE and its IDE, AtomWeaver, are now official!

Like any typical 1.0 version, there’s a lot to be done so expect a fast release cycle in the coming months.

From now on you can purchase an AtomWeaver license on the IDE’s site. The Early Adopter Campaign is now running, meaning that you can take this opportunity to support ABSE and AtomWeaver’s early growth and at the same time benefit from a 33% discount over the regular price. You’ll also get two years of free upgrades and have added weight on your requests for new features.

Anyway, AtomWeaver also runs in free mode: You can use AtomWeaver for your personal and commercial projects for free, forever. The free mode does not have access to the more advanced IDE features, but the full ABSE specification is supported. So, start using for free and upgrade whenever you feel you need more.