[mat-dev] Scripting support for MAT queries

[iulian dragos <jaguarul@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I started a thread on the MAT forum related to adding scripting
support for queries in MAT (also an enhancement request:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=335943).

To summarize my proposal, I suggested adding the necessary extension
points in MAT to allow a different engine for querying. OQL is good
for quick and dirty queries, but it lacks abstraction and reuse: if
one needs to drill down using the previous results, or write some more
complicated conditions, it quickly becomes cumbersome or even
impossible.

I proposed using JavaScript and Scala, as two possible
implementations. I see advantages for both: the dynamic typing
strategy in javascript makes it easy to code against unknown objects,
while Scala runs on the JVM and has better performance (while the
syntax is still very lightweight).

The Scala project has been selected as a mentoring organization for
Google Summer of Code (http://code.google.com/soc/), and I wrote a
project proposal in this regard. If we get a motivated student, he can
work independently but it would be very good to have someone working
on the MAT team for supervision. We can work out the details, but I'd
need to know if anyone is interested in spending some time in the
beginning for laying out the project plan. From past experience, such
students are quite motivated and work well on their own, but it is
important to help them implement the right thing.

Regarding licensing, I believe we can have the MAT work well
delimited, and written in Java. Given the right extension points, the
rest can be written in Scala as independent plugins (at any rate, the
Scala license is a BSD-like license so it should be no barrier).

cheers,
iulian