OVERVIEW OF THE TALISMAN VERSION 5 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING META-ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

This report presents an overview of Talisman's version 5 functionality. Talisman is a computer aided software engineering meta-environment. It focuses strongly on model driven tools. It provides means to build software development and maintenance environments composed of a harmonious collection of representation languages and tools. The set of representation languages and tools may cover a very wide variety of development and maintenance activities. Talisman operates on a net of workstations, each containing an environment instance providing tools to support some of the activities of a specific software development and maintenance process. The collection of environment instances supports a large portion of the activities of a given development process. Talisman stores fine grained objects in a distributed repository. The base schema and meta-schema of this repository as well as the definition of user interfaces, representation languages and tools are kept in a definition base. Definition bases are derived from an environment base which contains all facts about supported representation languages and tools. The environment base is used by the environment builder to create and maintain representation languages and to adapt tools to the specific needs of a particular project. One of the basic aims of Talisman is to compose and maintain code and other artifacts from high level specifications relying heavily on model driven activities. The result of the development using Talisman is a hyper-document interrelating all artifacts that constitute the target system. The construction and maintenance of this hyper-document is achieved by successive transformations, modifications and verifications of a variety of models. To define and fine-tune these tools, Talisman uses an internal programming language, which specializes tools and activities, such as editors, code composers, representation transformers, representation verifiers and hyper-document navigation control.