Skip navigation
2015

Artificer

February 2015 Previous month Next month

Once in a while, an old misconception pops up: early Overlord S-RAMP versions were sometimes seen as a simple extension of ModeShape.  It's true that there is a some overlap, when considering capabilities like ModeShape's sequencers.  But especially now, that's definitely not the truth.


JCR/ModeShape happened to be the first backing storage solution that was used.  And for good reason -- they're fantastic and the hierarchical nature is exactly what Artificer needed.  However, the architecture was purposefully abstracted in order support any other solution in the future.  For example, we're currently discussing the possibility of Cassandra, straight RDBMS, etc.  So, all capabilities need to be provided by Artificer itself, rather than strongly tying to any one backing platform and the built-in tools it may provide.

 

Further, Artificer's concepts are much more in-depth, compared to simple metadata.  For example, a WSDL can be deployed, from which we derive the Ports, Messages, Services, Bindings, etc.  Those derived artifacts can then be targeted by relationships from the SOA and ServiceImplementation models, allowing concepts like responsible Organizations to be linked to a given service endpoint.  Dependency connections can also be defined, creating the possibility for full-blown impact analysis.  And those are just a couple of examples.  The point is that the connections between artifacts, the rich metadata, the ontologies/classifications, etc. are why Artificer exists and where the possibilities start to get really powerful.

 

Just throwing that out there!  If there are ways we could better emphasize that within the community, I'm all ears!

As a user of the Artificer command line interface, do you have a set of scripts that you repeatedly run?  Tired of re-typing them?  You can obviously list those commands in a "batch file", then later execute it through the CLI.  Simply use the "-f /path/to/cli-commands.txt" argument.

 

However, a lesser-known feature of the Artificer shell is the "Log-to-File" option.  When starting the CLI, use the "-l /path/to/cli-commands.txt" argument.  All commands executed during the CLI session will be piped, line-by-line, to the given batch file.  We've also included a new "echo" command that will let your script print out useful logs.  So, rather than creating batch files by-hand, create them dynamically as you execute commands in real-time.

 

Simple, yep.  Handy, yep.