Today I did some research into why my Drools rules were running out of heap space in Java, even though there were not many rules (less than 300), and not many objects to iterate over (less than 10,000).

I found the problem was that I was using eval() in situations where it should not be used. So I wrote up an article with lots of pretty graphs.

Version 0.5.2 of the IAML Modelling Platform has been released.

This minor release adds autocomplete wires, and refreshes the rendering of elements in the diagram editors. There is also a small amount of metamodel refactoring, along with other issue fixes.

This will probably be one of the last minor releases before the final release for my thesis, which I plan to be 0.6. Since I am spending most of my time now working on the thesis rather than implementing the language, there will not be very much development work other than bug fixes, refactoring, documentation and adding minor features.

It seems that my choice of using Pygments to provide syntax highlighting for my LaTeX documents was a good one. After seeing how easy it was to add support for Drools, I found some more languages that lack Pygments lexer support, but it was very easy to add new lexers.

So I've created derived new lexers for OCL, Crocopat and LTL. They are all hosted on the IAML Latex sub-project. I love open source!

They are all currently very primitive and missing the actual syntax of the language; however, it will do for now. I should find the actual language specifications for each language and implement them correctly, but right now I'm focused on thesis writing, not style. However if you find a bug you could submit a patch or a feature request to the IAML tracker

It looks like I'll be doing this for quite a few languages yet, so expect more entries in the future.

I hacked together a very quick Pygments Style for Drools. It's basically a direct copy of the Java lexer, except that it has the Drools keywords included. You can download it from the IAML site.

It creates a code sample like this from this source .tex file.

It was very easy to create - I didn't really expect Python to be so easy to hack with. I like it. This lexer will be used a lot by my thesis, currently in the writing stage

Version 0.5.1 of the IAML Modelling Platform has been released.

It adds support for OpenID data types. Instances of OpenID URLs are always valid on the client-side, but only valid on the server-side once the user has authenticated with the given URL. Consequently, "authenticate" buttons are created next to InputTextFields set to OpenID.

It also adds support for RSS feeds, both consuming and producing; along with various other fixes.

Internally there has been a lot of metamodel refactoring, as I am trying to clean up the metamodel before I start writing up the thesis. The migrator has been partially implemented, but existing models (if there are any) using domain modelling concepts will need to be reimplemented.

As a result of the metamodel refactoring, some of the older diagram editors have been removed, so the plugin now takes up less bytes. Most automatically generated source code has also been permanently removed from the repository (issue 175).