Kyriakos Anastasakis « KYRIAKOS ANASTASAKIS – ΚΥΡΙΑΚΟΣ ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΑΚΗΣ

About Kyriakos Anastasakis

I was born on the beautiful island of Chios, Greece, where I received my primary school and high school education. At the age of 18 (in 1997), I moved to Athens to attend the Department of Informatics at the T.E.I. of Athens. In 2001 as part of a six month industrial placement, I joined Ulysses Systems, Piraeus as a junior Software Developer. In 2002 I received the degree of Informatics Engineer (Mihanikos Pliroforikis) from the T.E.I. of Athens. I continued to work for Ulysses Systems until the end of July of 2003. In 2003 I moved to Birmingham to study for the MSc in Advanced Computer Science at the School of Computer Science, at the University of Birmingham. In 2004, after I finished the MSc studies, I decided to stay in Birmingham and pursue a PhD degree in Computer Science. Since then I have been working towards the PhD in Birmingham under the supervision of Dr. Behzad Bordbar. Since 2005 I have been a part time self-employed software consultant. An interesting project I was involved in, was the development of a small scale CRM software for the Birmingham branch of MLP Private Finance. Since 2004 I have also been responsible for development and maintainance of the website of the Hellenic Society of the University of Birmingham.

A few weeks ago (http://kyriakos.anastasakis.net/prof/blog/?p=24) I posted that I was interested in .NET certification. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to work on it since then. The main incentive was to get acquainted with the DSL tools provided in .NET 3.0 (even though the available certification exams are only for .NET 2.0).

Today I read an article in ComputerWeekly that there is a shortage of .NET skills (http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/09/03/226513/employers-struck-by-shortage-of-.net-skills.htm)

It would be interesting to work on a contact .NET project and see the potential of applying Model Driven techniques in practice… But I guess I will have to find some time to study for the certification first.

I recently installed eclipse 3.3 and Java 1.6. Today I tried to use SiTra (Simple Transformations in Java) but when I tried to compile it Java started complaining on the following methods of the SimpleTransformerImpl.java:

public Object transform(Object object) {
return transform(Rule.class, object);
}
public List<? extends Object> transformAll(List<? extends Object> sourceObjects) {
return transformAll(Rule.class, sourceObjects);
}

The error was something about java inconvertible types. I don’t know if it is the new version of eclipse or Java 1.6. Looks like for some reason the compiler doesn’t recognise that Rule.class is of type Class<? extends Rule<S, T>>, so as to call the public <S, T> T transform(Class<? extends Rule<S, T>> ruleType, S source)

A simple solution is to ct the Rule.class expression to Class (it sounds weird but it worked).

So the transform and transformAll methods become:

public Object transform(Object object) {
Class r = Rule.class;
return transform(r, object);
}
public List<? extends Object> transformAll(List<? extends Object> sourceObjects){
Class r = Rule.class;
return transformAll(r, sourceObjects);
}

Alloy Analyzer v4.0 has been out for quite a while. Alloy v4.0 is an extension of the Alloy v 3.0 language (http://alloy.mit.edu/alloy4/quickguide/a4.html). More specifically parts of the concrete syntax of the language has changed (i.e. when invoking a predicate from within another predicate we now have to use brackets “pred1 [param1,param2,..]” instead of parentheses “pred 1(param1, param2,..)“. Also some of the properties of the language have changed (in MDA terms constraints on the metamodel, or well-formedness rules have changed). For example in Alloy 4 you are able to overload predicates, functions and fields. These are relatively small changes and it should be easy to accommodate them in UML2Alloy.

However, Alloy v4.0 has been developed from scratch and it is based on the kodkod model finder. The AST implementation has changed substantially and the convenience methods provided on the AST model elements are fine tuned for the Alloy compiler. For example Signature constructors are private and I couldn’t find a way to update the properties of Signatures (i.e. the Multiplicity of the Signature) after a Signature has been created.

Of course this is perfect if you have an Alloy model and you just want to parse, but not very convenient if you use an MDA approach to instantiate Alloy AST objects. For example in UML2Alloy you can change the Multiplicity of a Signature (i.e. change from set to some to enforce that some Signature instances will exist in the model). If you don’t have access to the Multiplicity attribute of the Signature class, after the object has been created, complicates the situation.

Moreover the AST class elements have been defined as final so there is no way you can override the Alloy v4.0 AST classes.

So, I spent almost 1 day evaluating the situation and trying to find a solution. One solution would be to create my own implementation of Alloy’s AST. Another would be to create wrapper classes of Alloy’s AST that will have pointers to the actual Alloy implementation.

Then I stepped back and thought about the siltation. Well, I already have a rather stable implementation that uses Alloy v3.0 AST. In Alloy v4.0 the AST has NOT changed. Just the concrete syntax. So the solution is easy.

Currently in UML2Alloy after the Alloy AST objects have been generated by SiTra, a visitor is used to create a text file that contains the Alloy model. So, all I have to do is use another visitor and override the methods that create the part of the model for which the concrete syntax has changed.

DinnerNow http://www.dinnernow.net is a .NET 3.0 sample application. I heard about it on ArcCast (http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/ARCast_with_Ron_Jacobs).

DinnerNow is an interesting application taking advantage of most of .NET 3.0 Windows Foundations (i.e. WCF, WPF, etc) and the source code is available for download. I want to download the source code and play with it over the weekend and familiarise with those kinds of technologies.

Lately I have started becoming interested in becoming a .NET certified professional. But is it worth it starting to work towards a .NET 2.0 certification, considering the visual studio 2008 will be out in 6 months time? However it will probably take sometime after the release of VS 2008 for MS to review their certifications.

For the time being I am thinking of working in my spare time for the MCPD: Web Developer certification. The main reason for this is that I need to get my mind off the PhD from time to time. I also have a free copy of VS 2005 Professional, when I attended the launch tour, so practising for the exams shouldn’t be a problem. My plan is to be ready for the first exam by sometime at the end of August. Let’s see if I can make it!

KYRIAKOS ANASTASAKIS – ΚΥΡΙΑΚΟΣ ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΑΚΗΣ

Author Archives: Kyriakos Anastasakis

About Kyriakos Anastasakis

.NET Certification

SiTra and Eclipse 3.3 or Java 1.6

Making UML2Alloy compatible with Alloy v4.0

.NET 3.0 Sample Application

.NET 2.0 Certification?