Trinity

Introduction

Trinity is a plugin for the Eclipse integrated development environment that supports the development and deployment of services on the MAS container through a simple user interface. The goal of this plugin is to integrate the tools and functionalities required to rapidly and simply create and deploy services in the Eclipse environment. It saves the developer having to do repetitive tasks like generating deployment descriptors, packaging files, querying the MAS container via console, etc. The Trinity plugin will take charge of these tasks.

The construction of the ASGen tool within the MORFEO project was the first step towards making the developers’ job easier. ASGen can generate the directory structure that the respective application should have for deployment in the MAS container (including the respective services stubs and skeletons and deployment descriptors) from the WSDL description of one or more services. To do this, this tool builds on other projects developed in the MORFEO Community, such as the TIDIdlc and TIDWsdlc compilers.

Trinity exploits the ASGen tool, which it integrates into the Eclipse environment.

Development

Trinity now integrates the following functionality into the Eclipse environment:

Creation of special-purpose projects for services development.
Generation of the directory structure that the respective application should have from the Java or WSDL description of the services.
Generation of service implementation skeleton classes.
Creation of the respective packaging or EAR file of the application.
Deployment, undeployment and redeployment of the applications in the MAS container.

As mentioned, the developer is allowed to give the services description in WSDL or Java. In the latter case, Trinity will map the description to WSDL descriptors to generate the application’s directory structure.

Trinity adds the following user interface facilities to Eclipse:

A new view to display the applications developed from the environment.
New actions for generating the application’s directory structure.
A new perspective that includes useful views and actions for developing and deploying services.
New preference pages for establishing MAS container access and location.

Evolutionary lines

Trinity’s evolutionary lines are:

Integrate functionality in Eclipse to manage the MAS container from that environment.
Support to generate clients for the developed services.
Transformation of other project types (like Java projects) into services development projects.