Hi,
On behalf of the Kitanda Development Group [1], I'm pleased to announce Dogen - The Domain Generator.
Dogen is a code generator designed to target domain models. It is crucial for Kitanda because we use a intensively domain-driven [2] approach to software engineering, resulting in a very large number of domain models. Dogen was created to make the modeling process simpler: the user creates a domain model in UML using the diagramming tool Dia [3] and Dogen uses the diagram to generate its source code representation in C++11. The main objective of creating a domain generator is to avoid having to maintain manually a significant amount of trivial code. We developed our own domain generator because we could not find one that fitted our requirements.
Note that Dogen has been specifically tailored for our needs and as such it is not a general purpose domain generator. We are, however, wiling to accept any patches for functionality not directly required by us.
At the time of this announcement, the current release of Dogen is v0.0.863. Main features:
* Generation of non-trivial object graphs including inheritance, aggregation, composition, etc. We are using Dogen to generate a large part of Dogen itself as a way of proving its abilities. See [4], [5] and [6] as examples of Dogen models.
* Generates code for std::hash, allowing the use of C++-11 unordered containers.
* Generates code for boost serialization, using Text, Binary and XML archives. There is partial support for EOS, but this is not implemented across all platforms - only Linux is supported at present.
* Generates a JSON representation of all domain objects, allowing quickly dumping objects to a stream (such as boost log) when debugging a problem. We chose JSON because of the large number of standard tools that exist out there for parsing. Note that JSON is not a serialization format; we only support it for debug dumping of objects.
* Generates test data for a given domain model, for testing purposes. This is mainly used to test Dogen itself, but it may be of use for end users.
* Supports a number of standard library types (e.g. vector, map, string, etc) and boost types (e.g. shared_ptr, variant, filesystem::path). We have been adding types as we need and will continue to do so.
* Supports models that reference other models
Important considerations:
* This is not a general purpose code generator. In particular it is not a merging code generator, so you cannot change the sources and see your changes reflected in UML.
* We use what can be considered pidgin UML in Dia. That is, we subvert the meaning of a few UML elements to suit our needs. We only support this small subset of pidgin UML. It is not a general purpose UML to C++11 code generator.
* We use feature branches and release off of HEAD - as such we don't have stable release numbers; latest is always greatest. This may change in the future if the number of contributions increases.
* Many of the ideas in Dogen were taken from Eric Evans' book [7] but we had to change some of them a bit/a lot due to implementation constraints.
* We are working on improving documentation, but at present there isn't much of it. Please ask if you have any doubts.
Useful links
* Github: https://github.com/kitanda/dogen/
* Demo (created a few sprints ago): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7k8qbImXkU&feature=youtu.be
* Continuous Integration (CI): http://hedgr.co.uk/cdash/index.php?project=dogen
* Binaries (straight off CI): https://github.com/kitanda/dogen/downloads
* Example of a complex Dogen model: https://github.com/kitanda/creris/tree/master/diagrams/rating
* Examples of the code generated by dogen: https://github.com/kitanda/creris/tree/master/projects/rating
* Backlog (list of open issues, features, ideas, etc): https://github.com/kitanda/dogen/blob/master/doc/backlog.org
If you have any questions or would like to discuss any topic related to Dogen or Kitanda, please come to our forums where we will be very happy to talk to you:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/kitanda/mbNfV0VZMy8
Cheers
Marco
Kitanda Development Group
[1] http://kitanda.co.uk/html/index.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design
[3] https://live.gnome.org/Dia
[4] https://github.com/kitanda/dogen/tree/master/diagrams/config
[5] https://github.com/kitanda/dogen/tree/master/diagrams/dia
[6] https://github.com/kitanda/dogen/tree/master/diagrams/sml
[7] http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Driven-Design-Tackling-Complexity-Software/dp/0321125215
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