The Fornax-Platform

The Fornax-Platform is a development platform for tools related to the Model-Driven-Software-Development - MDSD. In this context tools are cartridges, transforms, ready-to-use generators or simple enhancements to make it easier to work in a MDSD environment.

Another approach is to provide Howto's and tutorials that simplify the undestanding of MDSD. The Fornax-Platform provides infrastructure and tools to simplify the management and the development of such components and tools. It is independent from companies in this area of software development.

Frameworks used by and needed for working with FORNAX

FORNAX is based on ECLIPSE and uses the following projects:

• Subversion: Mean of versioning files (svn, tools are tortoise, subclipse or subversive)
• Maven 2: Apache Maven is an advancement of ANT with the ability to analyse and solve plugin dependencies
• Confluence: Wiki solution that is available with an open source license
• Jira: Bug tracking tool that can also take tasks, improvements etc.

Beside these the FORNAX community recommends two other tools for developing in a model driven way. The first is the generator framework openArchitectureWare. This framework is more than just a generator. Beside the template language XPand that is used to write own templates for code generation it has an own constraint language CHECK, a solution for generating text editors XText and many more. It is very flexible and customizable.

The other tool is Mylar a tool for creating and managing tasks. The subversion tool subversive needs Mylar installed.

Maven 2, Mylar and openArchitectureWare are integrated in the eclipse plattform.

Projects

This page is the best starting point to explore the projects hosted by the Fornax-Platform. In the following the projects are introduced briefly.

Archetypes

Archetypes are Maven2-Plugins creating a complete project structure with needed files and sample data.

Cartridges for openArchitectureWare

Cartridges are openArchitectureWare components that can be used for special needs like generating java code, or a j2ee application or a text editor or php.

M2 Repository

The Fornax-Platform is based on the Maven2 Buildsystem. The M2 repository administrates artifacts produced by the projects hosted on the Fornax-Platform.

Tool Support for MDSD

The projects of this category should make model driven development more usable, by enhancing functionality of the existing tools (the IDE, Modelling tool, framework, editors...). One example is the Maven 2 (M2) plugin for working with openArchitectureWare.

This is only a short listing of the FORNAX projects. The platform overview will give you a more detailed introduction.