The OpenEdge Hive

Proparse is ported to Java and can be launched as a little server which listens on a TCP port. It receives a program name, finds and parses the program's source code, and then returns a BLOB containing records of all the objects in the syntax tree and symbol tables.

The blobs will be read by ABL routines to generate ABL objects (temp-tables, data sets, Objects) as needed.

This new Proparse API will be used by another project right away. In the coming days you can look for “GUI BOM” here on the hive.

There isn't any timetable for a new version of Prolint using this new API.

API Goals

The API will be a facade for the byte data in the blob, and the API should generate ABL objects only on demand. For example, consider node:firstChild(). This should return a Node object. The internals of the firstChild() function will check to see if the object has been created yet, create it if necessary, and then return it.

As another example, node:getText() (or just node:text using PROPERTIES) won't actually return data from the Node object itself. The method will look up the necessary records in the blob to return the node's text.

Another example: Functions which query the syntax tree (for example: find all DEFINE nodes) should not operate by recursive-descent of all the objects in the tree, because that would force the creation of a Node object for every node in the tree. Instead, such query functions should work by examining the bytes in the blob directly, and creating those Node objects as needed for the result set. (The API will have to keep track of which Node objects have already been created.)

OpenEdge Version

It is probably reasonable to point out that you can use older versions of Prolint with older versions of OpenEdge. We will write some of the new API using ABL classes, but it wouldn't be a big task if anyone wanted to back-port the API so it works with earlier releases. We'll keep in mind that, when there's no significant disadvantage, we'll use a plain old .p so that back-porting would be a little bit less work.