IML extension

[Hervé]

Hi,

As a technical architect, I would be interested to extend the Archimate language with IML(Infrastructure Modelling Language) as described here : http://cognitsolutions.co.uk/publications/iml/

I've been thinking about creating a new plugin that will extend the native Archi elements and relationships. Unfortunately, I'm stuck because of my poor knowledge about the Eclipse framework.

1 - do you believe that would be even possible as a plugin ?
2 - if yes, could you please give me a hand and tell me how you would start in such situation ?

I'm open minded to any idea ...

Thanks and regards
Hervé

[Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie]

Hi,

1 - do you believe that would be even possible as a plugin ?
2 - if yes, could you please give me a hand and tell me how you would start in such situation ?

There's two ways of doing it: either you want to add new concepts and this will be very difficult through a plugin and will lead to non sharable .archimate files (the exact same custom version of Archi would be needed to open the file), or you want to use the Language Customization Mechanisms but as Archi doesn't support it, you'll have to contribute to Archi (but in this case this would became mainstream!).

My prefered choice would of course be to implement basic Language Customization Mechanisms. That's on our roadmap but any help is welcome (at least to define a minimum viable product on this topic).

Regards,

JB

[Hervé]

Hi Jean-Baptiste,

I need to read it more in details but it looks interesting ...

If I understood correctly, it would be to assign profiles to components and relationships to specialise them, each profile would define attribute. Am I right ?

In this case, that's exactly what I need. At the moment, I'm using properties with specific names but it is not really easy to ensur that the correct properties are provided for the right element (because the Archimate langage is very "poor", I have use nodes for nearly everything). That's why I began this week a new plugin that allows to create forms that shows up all the elements and relationships in a view and for each of them, the required properties.

But if I imagine right, rather than fill-in properties, I would apply a profile to my elements and my relationships (a profile for physical servers, another one for virtual servers, and so on ...) and then I would automatically have access to their specific attributes.

Great !!!

Best regards
Hervé