Archi Plugin: Instantiate a Solution Architecture from Reference Architecture

[bbaheer]

Dear Community,

I need to develop an Archi plugin as part of my Ph.D. desertation to enable the users of my reference architecture - developed in Archi environment - to instantiate an instance (solution architecture) from the reference architecture.

The intended plugin will be pretty similar to EIRA CarTool https://forum.archimatetool.com/index.php?topic=931.msg5090#msg5090 . CarTool is not open-sourced, so we don't have access to it. I have attached some screenshots of how does the CarTool work.



 

I am a complete beginner in this context, so please bear with me, and I apologize in advance for my unusual questions.

Thank you so much, and I look forward to your assistance.

Baseer

[Phil Beauvoir]

Hi, and welcome to the Archi forums.

Creating an Archi plug-in requires skills in Java and Eclipse development. In fact, every module in Archi is an Eclipse plug-in so a good starting point would be to make a bare bones plug-in that displays an Eclipse View and perhaps a menu item.

There is some guidance here (although that guide is a bit old now):

https://github.com/archimatetool/archi/wiki/Developing-Import-and-Export-Plug-ins

I suggest you create a public repository at GitHub and start building your plug-in there. It will be far easier to ask questions and get answers if you do that.

Regards,

Phil

[bbaheer]

Thank you, Phil.

As instructed, I followed the example and pushed the code to a public repo https://github.com/whitehacker/rasa. However, there are some issues that I will address in "issues" and hope to get some responses.

[Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie]

Hi,

The intended plugin will be pretty similar to EIRA CarTool https://forum.archimatetool.com/index.php?topic=931.msg5090#msg5090 . CarTool is not open-sourced, so we don't have access to it.

Well, it is an open-source plugin... for which the source has not been shared :-( I guess I have to try to get in touch with its authors.

I need to develop an Archi plugin as part of my Ph.D. desertation to enable the users of my reference architecture - developed in Archi environment - to instantiate an instance (solution architecture) from the reference architecture.

I have several remarks on this:
- I'm not so sure developing a plugin is the right thing to do. I'd say it should be avoided as much as possible. So, IMHO, the logical way of approaching this is: first try to do it whith Archi itself, then try with a (set of) jArchi script(s), last create a plugin.
- Archi does support specialization, which is already 50% of what CarTool does. The remaining part is related to ArchiMate profiles, for which some script could do the job thanks to some recent work shared in this forum (hint: a profile could be seen as a JSON schema, and you can have a script which reads this schema to let people key in information accordingly, information that you can save in a property for later reuse).
- If you really want to create a plugin, then I would focus on making it a generic purpose profile implementation for Archi that could be reused by other people (BTW, Herve's specialization plugin is already  adressing similar needs).

Regards,

JB

[bbaheer]

Thank you, Jean.

Based on our requirements, we really need to create a plugin to provide an easy interface for the governments to instantiate their solution architecture. I kindly ask you to make it public to invite other developers to contribute. I believe this plugin will add some significant value to the Archi environment.

Sincerely,
Baseer

[Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie]

I kindly ask you to make it public to invite other developers to contribute

CarTool has not been written by Phil nor me, it has been written by the European Commission. There's nothing more I can do than sending an email to the address they share on CarTool page... which unfortunately doesn't seem to work (I got an auto-reply saying that this email does not exist).

JB