[Uml-devel] Re: Umbrello design (was UML XML tree viewer)

[Andrew Sutton]

all,

more lengthy design stuff follows. the alcohol helps me understand :)

> Concerning your questions about XMI, I think that integrating the real
> MOF into Umbrello would show a high compliancy to UML standards (and I
> would really like that).

we can achieve high compliance to UML without MOF. the whole MOF thing is (for 
now) a "pseudo" shortcut to generating the UML implementation.

> I'm not sure about feasibility of this
> objective but, if it is, I think that the MOF should be clearly
> separate.

absolutely. but UML is defined by MOF so i think it should be around - if not 
specifically or currently linked to umbrello, i think we should build it.

> I don't think the development should consist in implementing
> the methods of meta-classes of the MOF. My last reading of UML was more
> than one year ago but I remember there are some methods that are
> specified in OCL. Most of these methods are only for navigation and
> consistency checking (am I right ?).

yeah. i think so. most of the methods are get/set anyway so there's not much 
to implement. i don't even think we have to implement OCL (although it might 
be nice) to be compliant. i know its never bothered me before.

> But I share your worry about feasability (integrate full MOF into
> Umbrello). Nevertheless, I think that all information that is (clearly
> ?) specified in UML should be separate (even if the full MOF is not
> implemented). If you plan to redesign Umbrello, I would suggest a
> progressive isolation of UML elements (MOF meta-classes) from other
> classes.

right. i think the only reason we'd ever want to link MOF into umbrello is if 
we are planning to support metamodel projects.

> Concerning your questions about code generation, I would prefer your
> second solution (read an XMI-File and generate code from there).
> If I try to give a (extremely simplified) architecture of the tool, I
> would see:

everything should be layered. starting from the bottom
	- libXMI
	- libMOF_bootstrap, libMOF, lib UML
	- libUML_gui (eventually libMOF_gui)
	- umbrello

codegen libraries can be completely separate because they have nothing to do 
with the defintiion, persistence or visualization of models. each code 
generator gets its own library and it can be linked into umbrello if we want 
to.

andy