Meta-Environment 2.0, Release Candidate 3 is online, and SDF 2.5 released

With the release of Meta-Environment 2.0RC3, SDF 2.5 was also released. This release candidate also supplies a binary installer for Linux/i386. See also:

• Downloads for source distribution of The ASF+SDF Meta-Environment 2.0 RC3
• Downloads for binary linux installer of The ASF+SDF Meta-Environment 2.0 RC3
• Downloads for source distribution of SDF 2.5
• Downloads for binary linux installer of SDF 2.5

The Meta-Environment will be released under the BSD license

All forthcoming releases and release candidates of The Meta-Environment and its sub-components will be released under the BSD License.

The Module Manager presented at LDTA 2007

The module manager, which is a core component of The Meta-Environment, and the prime vehicle for instantiating IDE's for other domain specific languages was presented by Taeke Kooiker at the Seventh Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools and Applications (LDTA)

The Meta-Environment demo at CSMR 2007

The Meta-Environment 2.0, release candidate 2 was demonstrated to a mixed academic and industrial audience at the 11th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering. This demonstration included the Software Visualization plugin for The Meta-Environment. This plugin was constructed by master students of the Universiteit van Amsterdam in a project for the courses Software Process and Software Construction. The plugin will be made available with release candidate 3.

SDF on its own website

The primary reference for SDF is now http://www.syntax-definition.org The Meta-Environment team has always made SDF available as a separately distributable and usable product. Due to this policy, SDF is now used by many different projects and people. Now, we also present SDF on its own website.

Meta-Environment 2.0, Release Candidate 2 is online, and SDF 2.4 released

See ReleaseNotes for a description of the next release candidate of the ASF+SDF Meta-Environment. With this release, SDF 2.4 was also released. This release candidate is the first to supply a binary installer for Linux/i386. See also:

• ReleaseNotes
• Downloads for source distribution of The ASF+SDF Meta-Environment 2.0 RC2
• Downloads for binary linux installer of The ASF+SDF Meta-Environment 2.0 RC2

ATerms in Top Ten most cited Software Engineering Papers

The January issue of the journal Information and Software Technology publishes a list of most cited articles in software engineering that were published in the year 2000. The original ATerm article ("Efficient Annotated Terms", M.G.J. van den Brand, H.A. de Jong, P. Klint and P.A. Olivier, Software-Practice and Experience 30 (3):259-291 Mar 2000) appears on the sixth position. A follow-up paper describing applications of ATerms appears in that same journal and can be found at ATerms for manipulation and exchange of structured data: It's all about sharing.

Plugin Architecture

Hayco de Jong defends his dissertation at the Universiteit van Amsterdam on component technology with its application to the infra-structure of The Meta-Environment.

See also:

• ICTregie.nl
• http://www.metamud.org/~jong

The Documentation Frontlines

The documentation project of The Meta-Environment 2.0 is progressing at a steady pace. See Documentation. Most of the old manual is updated already. The first guided tour (flash) demo was put online yesterday.

All progress made on the documentation front is published online immediately.

Using the Meta-Environment for COBOL Analysis and Transformation

Niels Veerman defends at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam his dissertation on Cobol analysis and transformation using The Meta-Environment. His cases include goto elimination and the detection of 'mines' in COBOL source code. See http://www.cs.vu.nl/~nveerman/research/thesis.pdf. Also see the popular article in the (Dutch) newspaper Computable http://www.computable.nl/artikel.jsp?id=1839499

Extension of Apigen

Antoine Reilles defends his dissertation in Nancy using ATerms and extending ApiGen into GOM. See http://www.loria.fr/~reilles/papers/manuscrit.pdf (in French).

SDF developer from Norway

Karl Trygve Kalleberg has joined to help SDF. He has added a Java version of SGLR to the Subversion repository. This version is currently still in alpha status.

New developer

Arnold Lankamp is welcomed as a new full-time developer at CWI. He will be working on the ToolBus and ATerm infra-structure of The Meta-Environment.

New website

The ASF+SDF Meta-Environment is going 'Open Source'. The system has been released with an open source license ever since its first release in 2000. However, we now actively promote it as an open source project. The reasons are:

• Some components have reached a stability that requires only minor maintenance. This means that such components may be maintained easily since all the requirements are clear and fixed.
• More and more sub-components of the Meta-Environment are being used by other systems, and thus more programmers naturally help with the development effort.
• More and more users and systems use SDF for parsing.
• More and more users use ASF+SDF for their source code analysis or transformation tooling, which warrants an effort in documentation targeted at specific usage scenarios.

The following measures have been taken:

• A new website: http://www.meta-environment.org, http://www.asfsdf.org
• A large Documentation effort is just being started
• New programmers have been hired for Contributing

If you would like to contribute to either our documentation or our sources, please contact meta-devel-list@cwi.nl.

Build environment factored out

Martin Bravenboer from UU helped factoring out the build environment of all our packages. This means that the source code has become more portable, and that many portability and compilability issues can now be fixed in a single location.

New developer for ATerm library

Erik Scheffers from TU/e is welcomed as a new member of the development team. His first goals are code tuning the ATerm library for portability, incompatibility issues with the newest GCC versions, and some minor efficiency issues.

Meta-Environment 2.0, Release Candidate 1

We have put a release candidate online for beta testing version 2.0. See ReleaseNotes for important information.