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| h1. Intent User Guide |
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| h2. Introduction |
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| h3. Pre-requisites |
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| The reader should have a minimal knowledge about MDA concepts, the eclipse platform, and the java language. |
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| h2. Overview |
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| The main purpose of Intent is to allow developers to easily write a documentation up-to-date with any development artifact (models, code, environment...). The documentation, integrated with other Eclipse tools, then becomes truly useful and is no longer a burden that developer have to carry to please their customers or their project manager. |
| Based on Donald Knuth's Literate Programming concepts and allowing collaborative work around design tasks, Intent will be presented at Eclipse Con 2011. |
| __Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.__ |
| *Donald Knuth*, Literate Programming (1984) |
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| h3. Installation |
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| To come. |
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| h3. Features |
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| h4. A documentation language |
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| A language mixing the wiki syntax from WikiText with a syntax dedicated to the definition of model fragments. This can be seen as a literate modeling (like in literate programming) documentation language, having the ability to : |
| * organize the design of the system as a document, keeping in mind the targeted audience and not the constraints coming from the development artifacts ; |
| * split the definition of formal elements among several sections or chapters, according to the need they allow to answer to. |
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| h4. An authoring tooling |
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| A complete IDE providing wizards, editors with syntax highlighting and code completion for the documentation language. Validation of the formal elements description will be fully integrated to this IDE. |
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| h4. A synchronization framework |
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| The synchronization framework is responsible for interfacing the formalism with development artifacts : |
| * it compiles the document into complete models upon which constraints and predicates can be checked ; |
| * it synchronizes these models with the real development artifacts providing the user two possibilities : updating the documentation or updating the artifact itself ; |
| * it has the ability to be extended to provide better integration with other Eclipse projects, enabling for instance consistency check between PDE artifacts and the documentation. |
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| h4. Output generators |
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| Plugins dedicated to the document export into popular format will be developed. |
