Research And Development Of Visual Modeling Tool For Database Based On Eclipse Platform

Database technologies, from its birthday to the present, have brought a great revolution to the management of computer information, which have owned solid theoretical foundation, mature commercial products and a wide range of applications in the past several decades. Now, all walks of life have been or are being developing thousands of database constructions, which have been regarded as essential infrastructure by various enterprises, units and even individuals. With the use of the database, the database itself has become increasingly complex and rich, so it is essential for the design of database. It has been an important issue to rapidly and intuitively initialize a database. This article is committed to research and development of a visual database modeling tool.After many comparisons and selection for platform, Eclipse is deployed as a development and design of the application platform. Eclipse is a sophisticated open platform, which is designed to run on multiple operating systems to provide only the basic user interface. Users can quickly develop special functionalities in the form of Eclipse plug-in, so they can focus on just the implementation.In this paper, for the sake of actual needs, the design and implementation based on Eclipse plug-ins have made for visual modeling tools of the database -abc VDM, the tools provide users with visual model editing, and user can export a DDL(data definition language document) file or spreadsheet file according to the given database model diagram. It has been proved through practical applications that abc VDM can simplify the process of operation, relatively enhance the applicability of modeling tools and the versatility to effectively improve development efficiency.Database modeling tools is written in the Java programming language which maintains a close relationship with Eclipse platform, and other technologies: the Eclipse PDE (plug-in development environment), GEF (graph editing framework) and SWT / JFace. JDOM is used for parsing XML documents, and design patterns MVC, abstract factory for design. All above technologies are aimed to achieve reusability and scalability and flexibility of the system.