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eBusiness Portfolio > Zhone Case Study

Project Category:
Custom Application Development

Project Title:
Data Definition Language Compiler

Client Profile:
Zhone Technologies is developing the first complete line of telecommunications infrastructure products for the local access network. They are headquartered in Oakland, CA; with offices all over North America. The Minneapolis office is the location of the IP technology development organization.

Project Challenge:
At Zhone Technologies, ArchWing was asked to develop a software code generator to automate parts of the company's software development process. The code generator, or compiler, reads a declarative language and generates complex C source code.

ArchWing's senior software engineer assigned to the project applied to this problem his knowledge of both advanced Perl programming and object oriented design and analysis. A key to the success of the project was the use of object-oriented design techniques. The project used sophisticated high quality language parsing guided by business rules. Object-oriented techniques allowed the compiler to be incrementally delivered and to grow as more sophisticated code generation requirements were discovered in the course of the project.

In its final form, the compiler has over 180 object classes implemented in about 9000 lines of Perl code; this does not include reused open source modules or the tens of thousands of lines of Perl code generated on the fly.

An interesting architectural point in the code generator is the existence of three distinct class families - one to handle parsing and exist as parse tree objects, another to represent the generated data structures and the code that must be generated to operate on those structures, and a third to encode knowledge about aspects of the C target language and its data types.

Project Benefits:
With the code generator in use as part of Zhone's software development process, Zhone is able to develop relevant pieces of software quickly and with reliably high quality. The customer has reported that software development efforts connected with the use of the code generator are running consistently ahead of schedule.

Note: Although more could be said about this project, our NDA with the client naturally limits our description.

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