Free for personal use, open-source projects, educational and research purposes.
Please contact us at sales@mobioos.ai for enterprise or organizational licenses.

Non-destructive code highlighting to clever wrap your features

Clever Wrapping: Business Cases

Mobioos Forge will allow you to drive your software implementation projects by clever wrapping your features. The created wraps will enable you to master your application to target the following objectives:

• Map Business Features into the source code: With its Maps, Mobioos Forge creates a bridge between the business domain and the application's source code. You can immediately locate in the source code the implementation of each of your business Features.

• Modernize Legacy Applications: Mobioos Forge helps you evolve legacy applications throughout Features Mapping to line up modern architectures. For instance, Mobioos Forge guides you to split your monolith legacy application into microservices that match your business Features.

• Monetize existing applications: By locating and extracting the implementation of each business Feature, Mobioos Forge helps you separately monetize your business Features as APIs.

• Manage variability for application customization: With its Customization Engine, Mobioos Forge aims to migrate your application as a Software Product Line. The objective is to allow automatically generating variants from your application that encompass only the needed business Features.

• Map Security Features into the source code: With its Maps, Mobioos Forge explicitly locates the source code fragments related to the security concerns of your applications. (Coming soon 🚧).

• Manage DevOps Activities and Artifacts: Mobioos Forge allows creating Maps for your Infrastructure as code languages such as Bicep and Terraform. In addition, Mobioos Forge also helps you managing Feature Flags to simplify your DevOps deployment activities (Coming soon 🚧).

Community 👾

If you have any questions or doubts, the Mobioos team is happy to help you. You can post your questions on our community forum on Discord to get help or to exchange with other users. Join us

Requirements 🧩

Mobioos Forge relies on other extensions to map your Features. To successfully map your Features, you must ensure you have the right extension installed on your VScode. Below is a list of some extension you can install that works well with Mobioos Forge.

Mobioos Forge supports these major languages and around 40 more!

To ensure that Mobioos Forge works with a specific language, functionalities like rename, find implementations, go to definition, etc., must be available in your editor for that specific language.

Installation 💾

You can download and install Mobioos Forge from the VSCode Marketplace. Once you have installed the extension, you will need to login with a Mobioos Forge account or a third party provider. We made a video available on youtube to show you how to log yourself by creating a Mobioos Forge account.

If the extension is installed properly and you have a valid license, you should see the Mobioos Forge icon added to your VScode's left Activity Bar as shown in the figure below.

Resources 🔗

User Guide 📙

We have written a User Guide to help you get started with Mobioos Forge. Discover how to use Mobioos Forge here

Github Repository 📓

Come see our tutorials or report an issue on Github here

Notepad: A simple text editor 📝

The Notepad application was initially provided by the FeatureIDE framework.

Notepad is a simple text editor written in java. It offers classical functionalities such as Copy, Paste, Cut, Undo, Redo, and Find. Discover Notepad on Github.

Hive: A More complex Web application 👔

Made with Mobioos Forge, Hive is an enterprise social network where coworkers can share different types of content to get answers from collaborators. This mobile/web application is merely an example to learn how to use the VSCode extension Mobioos Forge. Discover Hive on Github.

How It Works ? 🔦

Step 1: Create a Forge project

First, you need to create a Mobioos Forge project. To do so: Click on the Mobioos Forge icon > Create a Forge project. You will then be asked to provide a directory where the project will be stored and a name for your project. We recommend you give your application the root folder as the project folder. Once you provide the project's name and directory, the embedded Feature Model designer will open, displaying your newly created Feature Model. The video below shows the creation of a Mobioos Forge project related to the Notepad application.

Step 2: Design your Features (functionalities & resources)

Once you have created your Mobioos Forge project, you can design your Features through the Feature Model Designer. Regarding the Features of an application and as mentioned above, Mobioos Forge distinguishes the Functionality Features and the Resource Features. The Functionality Features refer to the business functionalities provided by the application. The Resource Features represent elements or values used by the application. This can be a data file referenced in the application, a color used to customize the UI, etc.
The gif below shows the full creation of the Feature Model of the Notepad application.

Step 3: Feature Mapping

Mapping the Features into the source relies on Markers and Maps.

Marker

A Marker represents an initial knowledge of the Feature in the source code that the developer provides. It can be considered as an entry point for a Feature in the source code.
There are two types of Markers:

• Code-Markers: Assign a specific code fragment to a Feature. It often refers to declarations in the source code (class, method, variable. etc.).

• File-Markers: Assign a specific file/folder to a Feature.

Maps

A Map refers to a code fragment that the Mobioos Forge Feature Mapping engine automatically discovers from a Marker. The Mobioos Forge Feature Mapping engine will automatically create Maps across the project based on Marker references when a Marker is created.

In Mobioos Forge, the Feature Mapping engine is language-independent. Therefore, you can use Mobioos Forge for any applications written in any programming language.

Creation of a Code-Marker and validation of its Maps

The gif below shows the creation of a Code-Marker and the validation of its Maps for the Functionality Feature Undo.

Creation of a File-Marker and validation of its Maps

The gif below shows the creation of a File-Marker and the validation of its Maps for the Functionality Feature Redo.

Once all the Features are mapped inside the Notepad application, we can create a variant (a customized version of the application).

Step 4: Customization

The first step to generating a specific variant is to create a Customization. Customization contains the list of Features you want to keep for your variant. To create new Customization: Expand your project > Next to "Customizations", click on "+" > Give a name to your Customization.

You can enable/disable the Features you wish to have on your variant on this Customization. You can also provide the specific resources you want your variant to use. The Figure below shows an example of Customization where the Functionality Features Cut and Redo are disabled. We also gave new images used in the UI. Those images can be found in the folder src/fa-images/.

Click on Save and Generate buttons to create your customized variant. Mobioos Forge will then create your custom application and place it in the folder $HOME_DIR/mobioos-forge-customizations/. The code of the generated variant is available on Github here. You can inspect the variant's source code to see the changes compared to the original application.

The complete customization process is summarized in the gif below.