SASSY - Project Establishment

The preliminary analysis did not turn up any insurmountable issues, so the
next step is to establish a project for the development. While I do intend for this
project to eventually be a collaborative development, I wanted to get the core
of the project written in a more private setting. Once I have something usable I
will transfer it to a public development area, such as Source Forge.

Fedora Linux

Since I am most comfortable in a Linux environment, and it has all the development
tools I could possibly want readily available, the project will be established
on my personal computer which runs Fedora Linux. I chose Fedora as it is based
on Red Hat which I often use for work, but tracks the latest developments. I
avoid the worst of the "bleeding edge" by remaining one release behind. This
means that all the issues will have been worked through when I upgrade.

Project Structure

The first step is to create the directory structure for the project. I created
a typical Subversion structure containing a trunk, tags and branches directories.
I will be using Subversion as my version control system. Once it goes public I
may consider using Git, but that is a decision I can make later. Within the trunk
I then created a bin, lib and include directories to install into, plus a docs
directory for documentation, an ontologies directory for data and a workspace (ws)
directory for the source code. The use of ws rather than src comes about since I
will be using Eclipse for the project's IDE, and it creates workspaces into which
the source projects are placed.

Documentation

I find it useful to document stuff (my memory isn't what it used to be), and for
this project there will be several documents, so the next step was to create a
document template for the project. The vision statement and the preliminary analysis
were then brought into the project. I will initially use Open Office, but expect to
move to Libre Office in line with Fedora.

There will be various diagrams for class diagrams and such. I use Dia as my diagramming
tool since it does a reasonable job of UML, and includes a variety of other symbol sets.
The aim of SASSY is to automate the creation of the diagrams, but until its up and
running I will need to do them by hand.

Tool Set

I like to document the various products that I use on a project. It makes it much
easier on the next project to be able to refer back to how it was done last time.
For each product I record how it was installed, any configuration that was done,
and any tips for using it.

As mentioned I will be using Eclipse for the IDE. Normally I would just run up a
few terminal sessions and use vi to do the editing. However, when working with
large, complex libraries things like auto-completion are very handy. I expect to
be doing C++ development as well as Java, so I included the CDT package from the
Eclipse repository. The CDT package also supports autotools which can simplify
development if we ever need to support a range of platforms.

For designing the user interface the Qt Designer is a suitable product, especially
since I will be using Qt for the user interface programs.

For defect tracking I am a fan of Mantis. I wanted to use PostgreSQL for the
underlying database, and after a bit of hacking I have this working satisfactorily.
For the very large projects that are the very reason for SASSY we will eventually
need to store the data in a database, as opposed to a simple XML file, so getting
PostgreSQL into the mix early on has some plusses.

Component Products

For the user interface programs I have chosen the Qt libraries. This package has
a complete user interface library in C++, is available for a variety of platforms,
and is open source. It also has an abstraction layer for the operating system which
may eventually be useful if we support multiple platforms. The only down-side I
see is that it has its own implementation of templates for containers etc rather
than use the STL. This can result in a lot of code moving data between containers.

The Protege product provides a complete front end for entering and editing an
ontology. It is under active development but is satisfactory for the initial
development. There are currently some issues with large databases and multiple
users for the OWL version 2 environment, but I am hopeful that these will be
resolved by the time we need them.

Program access to the ontology database is via a Java library called OWLAPI,
available from Source Forge. I am also looking at the owldb library which
aims to provide the database storage for large projects.

The mixture of C++ and Java presents a small problem since you cannot easily
call the Java libraries from a C++ program. My approach, initially, was to use
GCJ and compile the OWLAPI library into a form that can be linked into a C++
program. This eventually came unstuck, but that is a story for another time.

The documents will have diagrams so the GraphViz package gets a run for this
project. It allows you to input a graph in a simple format and does all the
layout for you, producing an output in a variety of formats.

The document formatting will be done with the LaTeX package. The output can
be converted to PDF using various command line tools.


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