ArchGenXML now produces Plone 3 code

The reason a lot of non-programmers (including yours truly) can be so productive with Plone and build their own add-on modules and custom content types with advanced behavior and workflow policies is that we can work in a diagram-centric modeling language like UML.

ArchGenXML is the — rather cryptic — name for the software that turns UML into executable Python code, so it can be used in Plone. Yesterday, Reinout van Rees updated it to produce Plone 3 compliant code, marking a major milestone in the preparations for the Plone 3.0 release.

The final piece of the puzzle was to make AGX generate GenericSetup-style workflow definitions — meaning that workflows are defined in a simple XML syntax instead of Python code. Said XML syntax is easy enough that you can write it by hand, but when workflows get beyond a certain complexity, it certainly helps to have a diagram instead of tracing XML definitions.

Why is this so important? It allows a lot of the simple, home-built content types created for Plone 2.1 and 3.0 to be updated to Plone 3.0-compatible products by feeding the UML model to AGX — no other work required.

At the moment, you have to use SVN to get the code from the trunk of the AGX repository, but we'll hopefully have a proper release as soon as the current code has been tested by a few more people.

Update: AGX 1.6.0 beta is now available, and supports Plone 2.5 and 3.0.

Reinout is definitely this week's Plone Rock Star — although he's competently backed up by all the people fixing bugs during the bug day/weekend we just had. This release is shaping up to be nothing short of amazing.

Time to get excited about Plone 3!