There are three main advantages of using Metastorage over traditional development methods that are less automated: Metastorage is capable of generating code from your component model definition in just a few seconds. It would take days or weeks to write, test and debug equivalent code manually by a human developer. This is very important to reduce the time to market your software products, especially if they are medium or large size projects.

Metastorage is an application that automatically generates code for an Object Oriented API to store, retrieve and manipulate the persistent objects of classes described in a high level data model definition. Metastorage provides a much more efficient development process for medium or large size applications that store and retrieve data from SQL based databases or other types of storage persistence containers, like XML files, flat file databases or LDAP servers.

Metastorage generates data object access classes. Currently it generates code in PHP. The data objects are stored in SQL based relational databases. In the future, other languages and storage containers will be supported. Metastorage takes a description of the information of the entities of your application data model defined in a XML based format named CPML (Component Persistence Markup Language).

In reality, Metastorage is just a wrapper script around the MetaL compiler engine. It takes the parameters passed in script command line and forwards them to the MetaL compiler. The parameters are used by specific MetaL compiler modules that take care of generating code and data files based on the specified component definition. Most of the work done by Metastorage is performed by the MetaL compiler persistence module.

The code generated by Metastorage can be as good as code written by hand by a human developer because the generator was also hand written by a human developer. The generator is not based on static templates, XSLT (XML Style sheet Transformations) or any other method that is not self-validating. The generator produces MetaL language source code that is validated and compiled before it is outputted in the target language.

Although Metastorage can generate code in any languages supported by MetaL, currently, Metastorage only supports the generation of code in PHP. The reason for this is that the code generated by the database and forms modules of the MetaL compiler relies on components that are only available in PHP.

Metastorage is available for download in the MetaL download page. It comes with documentation and examples of use. You also need to download and install the MetaL project archives to use Metastorage. You are recommended to read the Metastorage tutorial to learn how to install it, design components, generate code and UML class diagrams and use the generated code in your applications.

The progress of the Metastorage project is also recorded in a XML/RSS based feed available on the URL below. This feed includes not only the newly added features, but also the features that were added to the to do list. If you use a browser capable of rendering XML documents with XSL, you can see a list of projects items sorted by the date when they were updated. The items that are marked as done as those that are already implemented.

Metastorage was created and developed by Manuel Lemos. Other developers also contribute with additional tools.

Metastorage development started in the September 2002. However, a significant part of Metastorage is based on MetaL compiler modules that started to be developed around middle of 1999.

Despite Metastorage is Open Source, it requires a great investment of time and skill to research and develop. Making it Open Source was just a means to make it subject of as much testing and criticism as possible. That would help to find any design or implementation flaws as soon as possible. However, opening the source of Metastorage was not an absolutely necessary step as that was not the main motivation of its development.

Metastorage is mostly a derivative part of the MetaL project. So, for now you can obtain support by placing your queries in the MetaL mailing list.

One of the advantages of opening the source of a project is that you provide opportunities that let others fix any bugs and improve the project features. Sending bug fixes or improvement patches is one of the ways to contribute to the Metastorage project. If you do not have the time or you do not feel capable to contribute with any code, you will also be contributing if you just report any bugs you find or suggest any features.

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