Hello,
Finally I made time to release a full blown application based on MetaL
compiler persistence module.
Here is the release announcement that may also be found on the site:
http://www.meta-language.net/news-2002-12-05-metastorage.html
_________________________________________________________________
Released Metastorage generator
Manuel Lemos, 2002-12-05 16:11:44 GMT
Metastorage is an application that is capable of generating
persistence layer APIs. It takes a component definition defined in the
Component Persistence Markup Language (CPML), a XML based format, and
generates classes and storage schemas in a given target programming
language.
Using CPML, developers can focus their efforts on the modeling of data
structures that hold the information and the relationships between the
entities that their applications deal with. Metastorage takes care of
generating all the necessary code to store and retrieve such data
structures from persistent storage containers like relational
databases.
The main goal of Metastorage is to drastically reduce the time to
develop applications that traditionally use on SQL based relational
databases.
The generated APIs consist of a sets of classes that provide an Object
Oriented interface to the objects of the classes modeled using CPML.
The generated APIs are also capable of installing the data schema in
the persistence container, which in the case of a relational database
is the set of tables that will hold the persistent objects. This
completely eliminates the need to write any SQL queries manually.
CPML is independent of the type of persistent container. This means
that while it can be used to model classes of persistent objects that
may be stored in relational databases, such objects may as well be
stored in other types of persistence containers.
For instance, if an application needs to move a directory of objects
with user information from a relational database to a LDAP server to
increase the application scalability, the same CPML component
definition would be used. Metastorage would then generate classes
objects that implement the same API for interfacing with a LDAP server
that is compatible with the API generated to interface with relational
databases. This make the migration process easier and with reduced
risks.
Another possible benefit of the persistence container independence of
the APIs generated by Metastorage, is the case where an application
may need to run in environments where a SQL based database server is
not available. In that case the same API could be generated to store
persistent objects in flat file databases or plain XML files.
For now, the current version of Metastorage only supports the
generation of PHP code based on the database independent Metabase API.
This means that it may also interface with PEAR::MDB database
abstraction layer using its built-in Metabase API wrapper. In
consequence, many types of relational databases are already supported.
Since this is the first release of Metastorage, there is plenty of
room for improvement in the possibilities of the generated persistence
APIs and the level of optimization of the generated code. In the
future it will be supported other languages besides PHP, other
database APIs besides Metabase and other persistence containers
besides relational databases.
Metastorage is based on MetaL compiler persistence module. Like MetaL,
Metastorage is Open Source and is distributed with BSD like software
license. Downloadable archives and documentation with an example of
component definition are available from the MetaL site.
--
Regards,
Manuel Lemos
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