Development of Birt-A-D based on MDA

The core of MDA (Model driven architecture) is modeling and model-based software development. Developers use UML for modeling, in the model performance of the system in all aspects of the important features and details, to help architects and developers to obtain different system perspective; Based on the model software development, the requirement defined model can drive the software design and implementation process, in this process, will involve the transformation of different model architectures, Generate business and data code from the model to guide the view generation and change.

Overview

The EMF (Eclipse Modeling framework) is a concrete implementation tool based on the MOF (Meta Object facility), a set of structured model Java frameworks and code generators that help developers create, query, serialize, Deserialization and monitoring of model instance changes.

In some business-based, data-analysis projects, developers choose to use lightweight reporting design tools---Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) to produce rich, intuitive analysis reports. BIRT is a set of plug-ins for Eclipse, which allows you to extract data from a data source (including relational databases, XML files, and Java Object), analyze and transform it, and then generate various styles of documents, graphs, and complex analysis reports. However, more and more projects, for their own programming logic, intent to better integrate Birt into the code, rather than simply using the Birt design tools to create reports. BIRT has a good extension mechanism to provide users with the space for integration.

In this example: the author integrates emf into BIRT, directs user to design EMF model, extracts data from model instance, generates reports using BIRT API, and realizes model-code-view creation process. At the same time, it shows that the process of creating a report by using the Birt tool can be controlled and implemented completely, and the result is that Birt can be flexibly integrated into user code.

About this article

The application in this article was developed on the Eclipse platform, and before reading this article, you must have an understanding and application of the EMF, Birt, and other plug-in tools, and you can use the Birt Design report to extract data and create reports. The author designed a scenario based on service reporting: Using EMF model to describe business models, generating corresponding APIs, using the EMF API to obtain data information from the model instance, analyzing it, and invoking the BIRT report API to generate reports. The process of information extraction, analysis and report generation is realized by program control, and the Birt data source migrates from traditional relational database to EMF model, which verifies the extension of Birt to Java Object. The following figure describes the architecture of the application that implements this service report:

Figure 1. An integrated design framework based on EMF and BIRT

Get ready

The development and running environment of this article is based on the Microsoft Windows operating system. The following tools and Plug-ins need to be installed:

Eclipse---uses ECLIPSE3.2,JDK to use j2se1.5.

BIRT---use BIRT2.1.1.

EMF---use EMF2.2.0.

GEF---use GEF3.2.