A.0 Designer’s Architecture

A.1 Designer Is Built on Eclipse Technology

Designer is based on Eclipse technology. This open source technology is actively supported by more than 60 leading companies (such as IBM, HP, Intel, SAP, Fujitsu, and Oracle) and by thousands of other developers throughout the commercial industry and the academic world.

With Designer based on Eclipse, you receive the following benefits:

  • Published, well-documented, and supported APIs frequently used across the industry.

  • An underlying model that integrates well with any plug-in.

  • A rich, advanced UI.

  • Capability to fully and easily extend our product in the future.

  • Better integration and leveraging of other applications.

  • Open source as the basic framework.

    You can install Novell tools into any Eclipse-based framework.

  • Out-of-box tools (Java editor, debugger, JUnit, ANT, CVS integration) that are free if you want to access them (and other tools) within the Designer.

  • Cross-platform benefits of Java, but the native performance and native look of the platform.

  • Quick access to meaningful tools.

  • A framework that quickly picks up entirely new capabilities contributed by a larger community.

Instead of focusing on tools, developers are able to concentrate on providing quality content so they don’t need to spend as much time on creating, debugging, and fixing the framework.

A.2 The Designer Core Model Uses the Eclipse Modeling Framework

At the heart of Designer for Identity Manager is a strong object model that is based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework. This model uses the industry standard XMI format (XML Metadata Interchange Format) for storing objects and their relationships.

The main purpose of XMI is to enable easy interchange of metadata between modeling tools, that are based on the Object Management Group Unified Modeling Language (OMG UML) and between tools and metadata repositories, that are based on the OMG MetaObject Facility (MOF) in distributed heterogeneous environments. XMI integrates three key industry standards:

  • XML (Extensible Markup Language), a W3C standard

  • UML (Unified Modeling Language), an OMG modeling standard

  • MOF OMG modeling and metadata repository standard

The integration of these three standards into XMI integrates the best of OMG and W3C metadata and modeling technologies, allowing developers of distributed systems to share object models and other metadata. XMI, together with MOF and UML, forms the core of the OMG repository architecture that integrates object-oriented modeling and design tools with each other and with a MOF-based extensible repository framework.

Because Designer is based on this technology, you get the following benefits:

  • Published industry-standard APIs so that you can programmatically interact with the model.

  • A solid event-notification mechanism if the model ever changes.

  • All views, editors, and plug-ins are notified and in sync.

  • The ability to auto-generate Java code or UML from the model, or vice-versa.

  • Undo/redo the stack across all views, editors, and plug-ins that are in sync with the model.