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MetaL goes Open Source
Manuel Lemos, 2002-09-27 08:41:22 GMT
After more than 3 years of privately held development, MetaL source code
is finally publicly released.
The software license is
BSD like.
Basically this means that you are free to copy and modify it at will as
long as you preserve the original copyright notices and license
disclaimers. This license was chosen in order to encourage the adoption of
MetaL with freedom to modify without the obligation to contribute back the
changes or extensions.
MetaL was meant to be released as Open Source only when the proof of
concept was made with 3 target languages. The proof of concept consists in
generating the same program in different target languages from the same
source code written in MetaL and then demonstrate that the generated code
works the same in each language.
The proof of concept was made in early 2002 for PHP and Java. An XML
document creator class was generated in both languages and demonstrated to
work equally.
The third language chosen to make the proof of concept before releasing
the project as Open Source was Perl. The bindings for Perl were started but
not yet finished due to the lack of a project that would justify the time
to be invested in such bindings.
Meanwhile, I decided to open the project source now so more people could
use it, in particular with a new module that is about to be developed.
That module will be the first
meta-meta-programming module
to be written based on MetaL engine. It will be used for generating data
persistence layer APIs and (database) schemas that can map objects in
persistent storage like relational databases. |
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