[Uml-devel] UML Modeller and KDE 3

[Gustavo Madrigal]

On Tuesday 30 April 2002 00:27, P. Fleury wrote:
> Gustavo Madrigal wrote:
> >change. I have not heard anything from Paul Hensgen and I do not know if
> > he is going to keep working or not.
>
> I think this is a crucial part. All we need at the moment (from what I
> see on the list) is a coordinator, who is currently embodied by Paul.
> He might not want to continue, might have a personal problem preventing
> him from responding (like a 3 months trip away from internet to get
> away from university, etc.). What is the "etiquette" time between trying
> to contact a maintainer, and decide he/she does not want to be involved
> in the project anymore ?

Has anybody tried to contact Paul's brother 
"Steven Hensgen"<shensgen at hotmail.com> ?

>
> >--Automatic Documentation generation (a friend of mine is planning
> > something in docbook)
>
> But a good export method with scalable graphics of any type is also
> important. (EPS, SVG,KOffice part, etc.)

I think SVG would be a very good idea, I have been looking some code from a 
SVG Icons support patch for KDE3 and it does not seem very dificult.

> >I would like to coordinate the uploading of my patches.
> >I also would like to discuse about the actual design because I think there
> >are some problems on it that we need to fix in order to incorporate new
> >features.
>
> As yet another reader of that code, and a regular user of the program, I
> would be interested in this discusion too :-) Also IMHO some things in
> the GUI might need polishing.
>

I have several patches:

1- A patch from a friend to increase file loading/saving speed (It adds a 
nice progress bar to the status bar).
2- A patch to isolate data from gui elements for Widgets, basically I added 
the data classes for UMLWidget and subclasses, that way data can be read or 
saved from a file or clipboard without requiring to create a QWidget.
3- A patch to handle focus changes between listview and diagrams
4- A patch to get the clipboard working with UMLWidgetDatas
5- A patch to add non straight line associations, this also encapsulates the 
association behavior in one class, the class takes care of its related 
floatingtexts (Multiplicity and RoleText). This is not finished.

I have not apply this patches because:

1-They introduce some bugs.
2-Some of the patches require a new file version (version 5) to support non 
staright line assocs and to support folder inside folders in the listview.

Basically UML loses some of the current functionality in order to get new 
features (work needs to be done to recover the old functionality, it is not 
hard but requires time)

I do not know if I should wait to fix this problems before submiting or 
submit and then fix the problems. What do you think?

About the actual design, I have three main complains:

1-The UMLView class is too big, it handles four different diagrams using 
cases and a lot of ifs. I think we need to split it in a general umlview 
class and have CUseCaseView, CCollaborationView, CSequenceView, CClassView. 
This will prepare the incorporation of missing diagrams (object, activity, 
state and deployment diagrams)

2-The MessageWidget is not enough encapsulated, it should take care of its 
own floating texts instead of relaying in the UMLView class.

3-Have anyone of you seen a ClassDiagram of the UML Object Modeller? I 
generated one in Rational Rose (I know, I know...but it was the only tool I 
had to generate the diagram automatically), the diagram is unreadable, every 
class is related to each other ... it is a mess!! This is why when I change 
something to add a feature I have to change a lot of files, it will be very 
dificult to have several people working in different features.


Regards,

-- 
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P. Eng. Gustavo Madrigal
Technology Research Department Manager
Nextphere Corp.
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