ModelAnt as an extension of Apache Ant for practical managing models and meta-models, through industry standard technologies and Java APIs as:
- a JMI 1.0, MOF 1.4 compliant model and meta-model repository (a feature provided by NetBeans MetaData Repository (MDR))
- an extension of ANT scripting language to create, modify, query, traverse, print and process MOF 1.4 meta-models and resulting models with import from XMI 1.1 / 1.2 and export in XMI 1.2 format
- a template engine to generate text artifacts (including code) out of models and meta-models, using object-oriented JSP-like templates. ModelAnt 2.17 provides completely extensible examples of
- generating java code (POJO) from a domain model in UML 1.3
- generating SQL statements to create an [Oracle] database schema from a domain model in UML 1.3 where an ORM tool could store corresponding java (POJO) objects (see above)
- a system of classes that are wrappers around the model-specific JMI API forming a middle tier between the model and the templates, providing practical and non-trivial methods for model query and processing used in the artifacts generation
- a platform that provides core reverse engineering features as:
- reverse engineering ANT scripts and libraries
- reverse engineering XSD
- reverse engineering Java sources to reveal their packages, classes, attributes and methods
- reverse engineering databases through standard JDBC API, revealing their tables, columns, primary keys, foreign keys and relationships
- further conditional model processing and transformation
- a meta-model-agnostic models comparison
- a meta-model-specific comparison of models treated as:
- database structures
- UML 1.3 models
- a meta-model-agnostic transformation/copy of models between different meta-models
- a complete transformation of UML 1.3 models to UML 1.4 models
- an ANT script documentation macro ant.doc (i.e. reverse engineering + text generation) quite similar to the Java standard javaDoc tool
- an open platform for building more ModelAnt scripts and components to solve more practical problems.
The documentation of ModelAnt 2.17 by itself is a demonstration of the features of ModelAnt for:
- reverse engineering ANT scripts and antlib.xml definitions revealing the tasks, macros, types and targets in them together with the corresponding provided documentation
- reverse engineering Java source files revealing their attributes and methods with the corresponding provided documentation
- template-based artifacts generation using a simple and effective object-oriented approach
- model creation, query, walk-through and import/export using ModelAnt scripts
Version 2.17 of ModelAnt is published in the distributions repository. The documentation of the ANT tasks, types and macros of ModelAnt is published in docs/antdoc. The documentation of the java implementation code is published in docs/api.
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