There was a big fat cloggage in the compilation process. The tokenisation routine was using regular expressions before. Regular expressions I'm sure is the "proper" way to do it, but I just couldn't figure out all that cryptic mess. I had a regex expression to split the source into spaced words and "sting values", but had to further perform some regex on some regex to break up the code into the correct-tokens/that@may^be*like+this which was abhorrently slow. ...
Implementing this idea of type transformations has been quite an intense mental exercise for a fairly average programmer such as myself. I have decided to make it scriptable like the templates. It is pretty simple syntax supporting only variable (entity attribute) assignment, and if-else-elseif logic branching. It turned up some ugly skeletons in the metadrone closet since it's been a steep learning curve in the field of code compilation. I'm experimenting and wikipediaing as I go ...
Beta 0.8 is out. Added features: - project folders for organising sources and packages - cut/copy/paste (finally) - cached compilation. Zoom zoom! - various bug fixes and automation enhancements Next will be "transformations" which will basically be just customised schema attributes like table name, column or parameter type, added column attributes, whatever. So the hardcoded vbtype will be gone, and replaced with customisable logic (so will have extras like cstype and javatype) and you can add your own or change ...
My wife and I just came back from an exciting 6 week holiday in Europe. So I'm all fresh to hop on that reality treadmill - working at my day job and cutting code in the wee hours on Metadrone. For a while my mind was still back in some village in France somewhere, but I'm getting back into the momentum of it. Currently I'm working on two things for the next beta release: 1) cached ...
In 2001 I had some spare time to create a simple code generator to make some simple VB6 data input forms and data access code to go with it. But I never got any further with that idea, it was too much of a pain to tinker with the code generator source code. Only recently for the past few years this idea became more important, when I had to deliver a schema-heavy solution with many ...
Code generation certainly isn’t anything new. Metadrone isn’t breaking new ground at the moment. Many programmers have written their own code generators to speed things up to get them started. Although you need to be careful and forward planning since 99% of the time you are going to have to regenerate the code again and again and again. As a result we have immensely popular languages and frameworks such ...
I get excited when I talk about Metadrone. However I stumble a little when it comes to the ‘elevator pitch’ and explain to the normal proportion of the populace what it actually does so it’s hard for me to get other people excited about it also. The introverted computer programmer I am, I explain better with a keyboard than with my voice so I’ve started this blog. I’ll first attempt to explain what this project ...
