Automatic Generation of the Repository for PIE

Personal Information Environment (PIE) is an experimental software development environment implemented in the mid-1980's at XEROX PARC. It implements the idea of interactive development of programs. One of the most significant features of the system is that different design alternatives can co-exist in PIE. Developers can work on different designs choices at the same time, compare their characteristics, and share component and code among these designs. The original technical reports for PIE is here. The following figure shows the graphical contaiment model for PIE.

We give a demo of how our generaor produces code for PIE here. For people who want to try it out, you can contact Guozheng Ge for the executables and related documents. Please note this demo reflects initial work for the automatic generation of containment models, and does not show generation of version control operations such as checkin/checkout. We can also automatically generate RCS, a version control system with checkin/checkout functions, using our generator. That requires versioning overlay above the containment model and is discussed in our paper submitted to ICSE'04.

Step One: configure your environment for Java and Ant

Step Two: download either the source code or jar file. Uncompress source code into certain directory for build. For source code, before build, the directory structure is like this:

After build, the directory structure looks like this:

Setp Three: prepare model description file and repository description file. These are developed from the systems containment model. Here are two description files for PIE system: pie.xml and repos_pie.xml.

Step Four: run the generator at the command line, input paths to two description files and the generator will create a sub folder at the generator directory, e.g. generator directory is c:\temp\generator, then the newly generated PIE directory is c:\temp\generator\pie. The directory structure for PIE is similar to generator, after build the jar file pie.jar is also located under c:\temp\generator\pie\dist Enter PIE directory and run Ant build file to build the running PIE system.

Step Five: start MySQL database, run pie.jar and start using the automatically generated shell, which allows users to interact with the automatically generated repository. A programmer could also build a nice GUI frontend if he/she wants to replace the command line shell.