JMantlet Eclipse Plug-in
    Managing
Concern Interfaces

School of Computer Science
Software Engineering Research Group

News

[21 September 2006]JMantlet 1.0.1 was released and fixes a few small bugs.
[19 June 2006]JMantlet 1.0.0 was released today.
[29 May 2006] The paper introducing JMantlet: "Managing Concern Interfaces" by Jean-Sebastien Boulanger and Martin Robillard was accepted to ICSM 2006.

Overview

JMantlet is an
Eclipse plug-in to manage and enforce concern interfaces in Java programs. In particular, JMantlet can be useful to enforce the use of standard Java APIs and manage references to vendor-specific classes.

Motivation behind JMantlet

Programming Languages support separation of concerns and information hiding in a number of ways: abstract data types, object encapsulation, application programming interfaces (APIs), modules, packages, etc... These mechanisms provide a stable interface that hides a concern's implementation from the rest of the program and allows the implementation of a concern to evolve without directly affecting the rest of the program that interacts with that concern. A problem with information hiding is that providing a stable interface behind which to hide implementation details involves fixing in advance the services offered through the interface. However, often the services offered by an interface in one context are not sufficient or appropriate in another context. In such cases, developers are faced with the decision of either complying with the interface (possibly giving up on a service), or accessing the implementation (which introduces coupling and may lead to maintenance problems). Design idioms, such as interface segregation, can help mitigate this problem, but have limitations of their own. JMantlet is a tool-based approach to information hiding that allows to manage concern interfaces.

Using JMantlet

JMantlet is a tool to manage and enforce concern interfaces in a program. The developer must first declare the classes that are part of the interface and the classes that are part of the implementation of each concern of a program. The concern are declared using a simple XML format in a concern configuration file that can later be loaded in the JMantlet plug-in. JMantlet will generate a model of the concerns in the Concern Model Viewer, from which it will enforce the use the concern interfaces and restrict the access to concern implementations. If a class of a concern's implementation is referenced outside the scope of that concern, JMantlet will generate an error marker (i.e. like a compilation error) at the location of the reference. JMantlet also indicates the level of coupling between concern interfaces classes and their implementation.

Screen Shots

Click on the description to see the screen shot.

Download

You can easily install JMantlet and obtain its source code through Eclipse's update mechanism. JMantlet is distributed under the terms of the
GNU General Public License (GPL).

System requirements: Eclipse 3.1, Java 1.4. JMantlet has been tested on Windows and Linux.

To install JMantlet:

  1. From the Eclipse menu bar, select Help | Software Updates | Find and Install...
  2. Select "Search for new features to install" and click Next >
  3. Click on the New Remote Site... button.
  4. For the name, enter "JMantlet". For the URL, enter "http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~jboula2/jmantlet", and click OK
  5. Select the new JMantlet entry in the list and click Finish
  6. In the list of features to install, select the root node of the JMantlet tree, and click Next >
  7. Select that you accept the terms of the license agreement, and click Next >
  8. Click Finish, and then Install
  9. Restart your workspace.

You should now have the JMantlet plug-in installed. A new JMantlet button should appear in your task bar as well as a JMantlet Checker menu. To get started:

  1. Open the Concern Model Viewer.
  2. Select Window | Show View | Other.
  3. Under the JMantlet folder, select Concern Model Viewer and click Ok. The JMantlet Concern View will appear.

To update an existing installation of JMantlet:

  1. Make sure that your version of Eclipse allows compatible updates. Select Window | Preferences | Install/Update and make sure the compatible radio button is selected under Valid updates.
  2. Select Help | Software Updates | Manage Configuration
  3. Select the JMantlet feature.
  4. Click on Scan for Updates, and go through the motions.

To obtain the source code of JMantlet:

The JMantlet source code is included with the plug-in. To obtain the source code:

  1. Install JMantlet as directed above.
  2. Find the directory named ca.mcgill.cs.serg.jmantlet_... in the plugin directory of your Eclipse installation.
  3. The source code is in the src/ folder.

Documentation

More detailed documentation for JMantlet is included in the Eclipse help once you have installed the plugin.

Publications
Jean-Sébastien Boulanger and Martin P. Robillard. Managing Concern Interfaces. To appear in Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2006.

Contact

Address questions, comments, and bugs to Jean-Sebastien Boulanger.

Copyright © Jean-Sebastien Boulanger 2006