[Uml-devel] UML for documentation and other feature requests

[Andrea Aime]

>  Andrea,
>
> I strongly disagree if you suggest that kind of things should be hard-coded
> (as opposed to embedded scripting)
> I love Python and that would be the best choice anyway, IMHO.
> KOffice , a major KDE application suite, where UML Modeller would fit in,
> opted for Python scripting as well.

Uhm, I've checked and only Kivio uses embedded python to support scripting,
the other applications uses DCOP scripting, but in a very limited form. 
Moreover, uml modeller is a developer tool, not a productivity application, 
and better integration with kdevelop is being considered by kdevelop
developers. Anyway, to be part of KOffice one should use their application
architecture, and uml modeller is not based on this (koDocument and so on).

I agree that scripting is important, since uml modeller cannot address
directly every possible user need, but exposing DCOP interfaces would 
allow a better integration with KDE and allow for multiple scripting languages
(python of course, but also perl, scheme and even bash scripts).

For what concerns use cases I think that we should support them directly,
and not thru scripting, only because requisite management is a foundamental
need in the development cycle. I know that it's difficult to find an 
agreement on which sections compose a single use case, but this may 
be solved by using an external template, written in XML, and by generating
documentation gathering dialogs at run time. This approach could be extended 
to allow special documentation structure for every component of every UML 
diagram, thus allowing for different documentation needs.
At the same time, a proper documentation builder could be constructed to
allow for documentation generation from the diagram (in XML, HTML of
KWord format, and using a builder pattern, for every other format you
may want to support).

Would this proposal address your needs and concerns about hard
coded behaviour? Any way, a full DCOP interface would allow everyone
to create whatever extension they need, but I don't see a full DCOP 
scripting interface near just around the corner. Even KOffice exposes
just a few commands, not a full fledged object model.
Best regards
Andrea Aime