Python and EA

For my current contract, I'm part of a team producing scripts which define interfaces to equipment in a satellite communications system for monitoring and control. Various interfaces, serial, low-level TCP and SNMP.

The application is fairly old - originated on Unix in early 1990s, ported to MFC late 1990s - and there are many links between the various configuration files. It's a high reliability system, so uses the classic pattern of a watchdog process with spawns the active processes, monitors them for liveliness, CPU and memory use, and respawns them or kills them in event of failure.

The goal is to use Enterprise Architect for modelling the system in UML. EA has a limited custom code generation - one file per class, poor tree walking functionality - which is just sufficient to create the interface scripts, but none of the other configuration which is more highly intertwined - for each rack or group of racks of equipment to be monitored, there's a server which runs a set of monitoring processes, each monitoring a set of instances of the equipment. Various parts of the configuration, such as the port ID of each server process, need to be put into different configuration files, so the desired layout of generated files doesn't follow EA's assumptions.

Also, there needs to be a parser for the configurations which reverse engineers a UML model from the configuration files - we don't want to have to generate the UML models for existing equipments by hand.

So I started writing a little parser in Python which generated an XMI file for import into EA. That worked well enough, and impressed the line manager, so have been spending the last couple of days fleshing it out.

EA doesn't quite treat tagged values as first-class citizens of UML, relegating them to a second window (though it's nice to have them docked and always visible, but that could apply to all the panes in the properties dialogs). So I wanted a table view which looked like the config file layout, of all the extra tagged values we're using to define the application specific properities used to implement the attributes of the equipment in the configuration files.

I've been using GTK for that - I've played with GTK a bit in C, and quite like it's level of abstraction and simple event model. It's not too hard to get things working in Python (some of the handling of attributes is a bit counter intuitive), and it mostly looks native (compared to Java or Gecko, or even EA's UI, which I believe is written in C#, but isn't using WinAPI menus).

I quite like Python, but it's a bit too imperitive for my taste, and there's no type system to tell you if you've put a right-handed vector into a left-handed library, or referenced an attribute of an object which doesn't exist. But being able to create a simple dialog with a REPL (read/eval/print/loop) in it to do the initial exploration of the EA COM automation interface was very handy.

The thing I dislike most in Python is that it doesn't actually use indentation to indicate blocks (I read Ken Arnold's chapter in The Best Software Writing over the weekend, and think I agree). It uses the colon character to indicate a block, and following a colon you have to use indentation. I'm always just doing the indentation, and forgetting the colons.