My basic problem is finding a way to import from an ARIS model to Rational System Architect. From what I understand from searching the IBM website and Google, it looks like it does not support loading 3rd party tools from XML (although the article is 5 years old and I cannot find anything newer). I have the export of ARIS and the DTD file to go along with it. However when I attempt to import into System Architect I get the following error...
The input contained no valid objects.
Which in my opinion makes sense - if its not setup to import from other products. But with that being said, does anyone know a way to achieve this? Searching online has yielded very little or poor results thus far.
Update - As an additional thought, I have been looking into DDL files. System architect seems to say it will work with them, however I have not been able to find out anything about how to create one using ARIS, or how they are used in general. This may end up being the solution, but sadly I am not well versed in this area yet.
The answer seems to have come down to two options.
Use a 3rd party tool to mediate the process, and convert it. Basically there is a number of other tools out there (such as ToolBus - which is the only one I found that worked for me) that convert from various applications to a single common model. From there it can be exported back to any application.
Depending on the models, the newer versions of SA can import BPMN models directly. Mind this only works for those - nothing else.
Related
I'm not sure if this is the exact place for this question, but I saw that other Altium questions had been posted here.
My team is using Altium to work on this project, but not all of us are familiar with Altium. In fact, really only one team member has the skills to do the bulk of the work.
Setting aside the issues of cross-training, etc., the rest of us want to do our best to further the work. To that end, can Altium accept CSV files? Like, if we had a CSV of the BoM for a PCB, could we import that so that we don't have to manually input all of the desired information into Altium?
Additionally, are there other areas where we could use CSVs? Like, could we import a schematic that was generated by another piece of software?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I suspect you cannot use CSV files without scripting. However, there are quite a many components available. Unfortunately, they are not consistent, and some modifications are needed before saving them to your own library.
You can import schematics (and layouts) from some other sw vendors. File>Import Wizard. Some of them require external license, and format can be fixed. Check Extensions and Updates to make sure you have needed plugins available.
12-Factor Apps suggest that you configure your application using environment variables. So far, so good. I can easily imagine that this is a good way to do it if you need to set a connection string, e.g.
But what if you have more complex configuration with lots and lots of values? I for sure do not want to have 50+ environment variables, do I?
How could I solve this, and still be compliant to the idea of 12-Factor Apps?
From a quick read of the configure link you provided, I agree with the author's claim that there is a widespread problem, but I am not convinced that their proposed solution is going to always be best. Like you, I don't relish the idea of having to define dozens of environment variables to configure an application. So here are some alternative ideas.
First, read Chapter 2 of the Config4* Getting Started Guide (disclaimer: I am the main author of that software). In particular, notice that its support for what I call adaptive configuration can go a long way towards addressing the concern that you ask about. Is Config4* the ultimate solution? Possibly not, but I think it is a good step in the right direction.
Second, the chances are that whatever application you are developing/maintaining has already settled on a particular configuration technology, such as XML files or Java property files, and it won't be feasible to migrate to using Config4*. This raises the question: is there anything you can do to avoid having a proliferation of, say, XML-based configuration files when you have multiple environments (such as dev, UAT, staging and production) in which the application will be deployed? I have outlined an approach for dealing with this issue in another StackOverflow article.
I saw this tutorial for writing a JSON-RPC server for SWI-Prolog. Unfortunately, all it does is add two numbers. I'm wondering if there exists a RPC server for SWI-Prolog that can define new rules and answer general Prolog queries, returning JSON lists, etc?
When you take a tour on SWI-Prolog website, proudly self-powered, you can see at work some of the features offered by http package.
It's a fairly large range of tools, and to grasp the basic of the system, the easiest way it's to follow the specific How to section, step by step. There is a small bug you should be aware in the LOD Crawler: add an option on line 42 of lod.pl:
...
; rdf_load(URI2, [format(xml)]),
....
or you will probably get
Internal server error
Domain error: content_type' expected, found text/xml;charset=UTF-8'
when running the sample.
An important feature of the IDE it's the ability to debug the HTTP requests.
When done with the HowTo, you can take a look to Cliopatria, dedicated to interfacing RDF to HTML. It come with a pirates demo, I must say I find it a bit too 'crude' for my taste, and I don't know about YUI, used in the award winning MultimediaN project. Then I've used Bootstrap to gain a modern look for the front end, with appreciable result (I'm sorry I can't - yet - publish it, need more time to engineering the system).
HTH
I'm looking for some simple (free!) entry level software that will allow me to create simple 3d models and export them in a format (JSON?) that can then be read into a webGL programme.
Simple geometry would be a start, then textures would be nice too... I've looked at Blender, and it's just far too advanced for me, and the tutorials I've found are hopeless.
Something simple like sketchup would be good, but afaik you can't export in JSON. I've found some converters that will do .dae to .json, but the ones I've found seem to be for advanced users.
WebGL is new enough that there aren't many packages like this built up around it just yet. That doesn't mean you don't have some options though:
Blender is a good modeler, and if you are willing to put a little bit more time into learning it you can use exporters from Three.js or some others that are around the net. This seems to be the most popular option at the moment.
Unity 3D is more of a scene builder than a modeling app, but it has a lot of ways to get content into it and both J3D and myself have implemented exporters from it.
Maya is a great modeling tool if you have a way to get access to it (it's commercial), and has Inka to get WebGL content out.
If you want to use something like SketchUp, it should be able to export to COLLADA, which can then be imported into Blender/Unity/What have you and exported from there using one of the previous methods.
As far as formats go, there's no real standards just yet. Most of the exporters will spit out JSON, mine uses a mix of JSON and Binary for speed/size, and some will actually give you Javascript code to execute. Which format to use probably depends on what you want to do with it. I encourage you to experiment with several and see what you like and what you don't.
How does one study open-source libraries code, particularly standard libraries?
The code base is often vast and hard to navigate. How to find some function or class definition?
Do I search through downloaded source files?
Do I need cvs/svn for that?
Maybe web-search?
Should I just know the structure of the standard library?
Is there any reference on it?
Or do some IDEs have such features? Or some other tools?
How to do it effectively without one?
What are the best practices of doing this in any open-source libraries?
Is there any convention of how are sources manipulated on Linux/Unix systems?
What are the differences for specific programming languages?
Broad presentation of the subject is highly encouraged.
I mark this 'community wiki' so everyone can rephrase and expand my awkward formulations!
Update: Probably didn't express the problem clear enough. What I want to, is to view just the source code of some specific library class or function. And the problem is mostly about work organization and usability - how do I navigate in the huge pile of sources to find the thing, maybe there are specific tools or approaches? It feels like there should've long existed some solution(s) for that.
One thing to note is that standard libraries are sometimes (often?) optimized more than is good for most production code.
Because they are widely used, they have to perform well over a wide variety of conditions, and may be full of clever tricks and special logic for corner cases.
Maybe they are not the best thing to study as a beginner.
Just a thought.
Well, I think that it's insane to just site down and read a library's code. My approach is to search whenever I come across the need to implement something by myself and then study the way that it's implemented in those libraries.
And there's also allot of projects/libraries with excellent documentation, which I find more important to read than the code. In Unix based systems you often find valuable information in the man pages.
Wow, that's a big question.
The short answer: it depends.
The long answer:
Some libraries provide documentation while others don't. Standard libraries are usually pretty well documented, whether your chosen implementation of the library includes documentation or not. For instance you may have found an implementation of the c standard library without documentation but the c standard has been around long enough that there are hundreds of good reference books available. Documentation with hyperlinks is a very useful way to learn a new API. In any case the first place I would look is the library's main website
For less well known libraries lacking documentation I find two different approaches very helpful.
First is a doc generator. Nearly every language I know of has one. It basically parses an source tree and creates documentation (usually as html or xml) which can be used to learn a library. Some use specially formatted comments in the code to create more complete documentation. JavaDoc is one good example of this. Doc generators for many other languages borrow from JavaDoc.
Second an IDE with a class browser. These act as a sort of on the fly documentation. Some display just the library's interface. Other's include description comments from the library's source.
Both of these will require access to the libraries source (which will come in handy if you intend actually use a library).
Many of these tools and techniques work equally well for closed/proprietary libraries.
The standard Java libraries' source code is available. For a beginning Java programmer these can be a great read. Especially the Collections framework is a good place to start. Take for instance the implementation of ArrayList and learn how you can implement a resizeable array in Java. Most of the source has even useful comments.
The best parts to read are probably whose purpose you can understand immediately. Start with the easy pieces and try to follow all the steps that are hidden behind that single call you make from your own code.
Something I do from time to time :
apt-get source foo
Then new C++ project (or whatever) in Eclipse and import.
=> Wow ! Browsable ! (use F3)