Download

ActiveFacts is packaged as a Ruby GEM. You should install Ruby, and say

  sudo gem install activefacts
  

After installing, you can read the Ruby API documentation by visiting http://localhost:8808/ in your browser after starting

  gem server
  

CQL Examples are provided in a directory under your gem directory, and you can generate code from them using commands like the following (change the path to your gem repository):

  afgen --ruby /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activefacts-0.6.0/examples/CQL/OilSupply.cql
  afgen --sql/server /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activefacts-0.6.0/examples/CQL/Warehousing.cql
  

afgen also reads .orm files from NORMA.

Source Code Repository

The Subversion repository is also available at RubyForge. If you're on Windows and don't have Subversion installed, you can also get a client like Tortoise or cygwin. If you use a command-line svn client, say:

  svn checkout http://activefacts.rubyforge.org/svn/

    or

  svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/activefacts
  

Object Role Modeling

If you want to draw your own Object Role Modeling diagrams and have a copy of Windows Visual Studio (pro only, not Express), you can freely download and install the Neumont ORM Architect. The example models are available in the correct format from the SVN repository. The ActiveFacts generator afgen can process ORM files as easily as CQL files, though a little slower due to the volume of XML to be parsed.

More information and discussion

Status messages go to the Yahoo information_modeling group, which is also available as an NNTP feed on Gmane. Subscribe today and share your thoughts!