Component Templates for Assets and Artifacts
An Eclipse-based toolkit for simplifying asset reuse and complex configuration tasks.
Date Posted: October 12, 2006
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What are Component Templates for Assets and Artifacts?
This technology is used to create reusable assets that are highly configurable, self-validating, self-describing, composable, and easy to use. Asset usage information is encoded in the form of template constraints and verifiers that ensure that errors, omissions, and misguided choices are caught before the asset is used.
The toolkit was implemented in Java® as a set of Eclipse plug-ins.
How does it work? Templates are created by subject matter experts for use by less-knowledgeable users; existing assets are often used. Template developers use a simple wizard to create and package a new template from an existing artifact or asset and to identify its configuration points. An editor is then used to define constraints, validation, documentation, and presentation preferences before making the template available for use.
Users select templates from a palette and use a simple wizard to create template instances. An editor is used to configure the template instance, which automatically enforces the template-defined constraints and validation. When the configuration is saved, a "build" process runs in order to create the customized form of the asset or artifact ready for use.
The technology uses a comprehensive model to describe the configurable aspects of an artifact or asset. The model is technology-neutral, allowing a wide variety of disparate asset types (for example XML, properties files, scripts, source code, etc.) to be described consistently and managed with a single set of tools.
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| | About the technology author(s):
This technology was developed by Andy Clarke, Christopher Gibson, David Screen, Darren Shaw, Emma Shepherd, Gordon Hutchison, and Mu Zhang, all from the IBM Software Group's Architecture Board Incubator Projects at the IBM Hursley Laboratory in the U.K.
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