An Action factory quick presentation
The ActionFactory is just another software package around workflow.
- Visual Programming Environment (VPE)
GUI for designing actions, generating C++ CORBA wrapper for them,
and design executable specifications of computationnal pathes.
- Automatic Activation Daemon (AAD)
A set of macro shield the ActionFactory implementation from
CORBA implementation specific rules. It currently implements
rules for Orbacus, Orbix and Visibroker.
Orbacus is the only one to be free for non-commercial use,
but lacks automatic activation. AAD is an automatic activation
daemon for Orbacus, which is moreover Orbix compliant and
works on most UNIX and NT.
- FactoryAction
This is the generic class from witch VPE generated factories
will inherit. It implements most of the generic actions behaviour.
For a quick online introduction, look at the
VPE's overall presentation.
A different (but paper only) presentation is also available
here.
ActionFactory concept matured in various personnal and professionnal projects,
and interesting parts of the concept were implemented in the context of the
EEC R&D ESPRIT Julius project.
As Dassault Aviation just decided to release the core ActionFactory,
(which I participated in professionnally) in GPL,
I tried to regroup all of the GPL professionnal and personnal developments,
to make them all available in a single place.
I'm in the process of putting all that on SourceForge,
to have a proper maintenance and development environment,
but you'll have to live with what's available here for the moment.
Commercial distribution and support is available for ActionFactory,
through a spin-off company from the University of Wales, Swansea:
CDR (contact:
jason.jones@uws.swan.ac.uk)
Thanks to all of the contributors to this project, providing ideas, code,
bug reports, smart advices, moral support, coffee...
First, the heavy core contributors, also from Dassault Aviation :
Pierre Lafraise (Peter the Strawberry)
for most of the internal FactoryAction coding,
Marc Sirigu (CORBA's SuperMario)
for the Automatic Activation Daemon,
and Frédéric Duchesne (Duc, Fred Duc)
for being our always enthousiastic alpha tester and debugger.
Then, our first users,
Jérôme Luvisutto, Philippe Thomas and Steven Kleinveld at Dassault,
Jason Jones and Subodh Vaid at the University of Wales, Swansea,
and Udo Tremell at EADS/DASA.
And all the members of the Julius Team !
Thierry
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