[Uml-devel] Re: karbon14 and uml

Sebastian Stein seb_stein at gmx.de
Mon Apr 14 23:47:03 UTC 2003


Dirk Schönberger <dirk.schoenberger at sz-online.de> [030415 08:27]:
> Why? All you do is browsing some hierarchies.

Really? I'm not sure about that. Of course if you stay in the logical view
you just have a hierarchie, but now you switch to another view and you are
looking at the same hierarchie from a very different point.

Let's look at a package diagram. There you have stereotypes <<uses>> and
<<includes>>:

1. <<includes>>

package1 <<includes>> package2 and package3.
package3 <<includes>> package4 and package5.

2. <<uses>>

package1 <<uses>> package4 and package2
package2 <<uses>> package3 and package5

Now draw this diagram and you will see that the representation changed
completely. I don't know how to handle this in file browser approach. But if
you find a good solution, I would be the first to experiment with it!!!

Another point very important. You have file browsers like Konqueror or MS
Explorer. But you are more productive with a file browser like
MidnightCommander or TotalCommander. So both types are showing the
hierarchie, but the handling is different. So I would say that Konqueror
style don't have to be the best to handle hierarchies.

And another point. Let's reduce Konqueror to it's base. It is nothing more
than a giant tree view. Nothing more.

> > the structure the files are stored on the harddisk. This is mostly useless
> > for the user. A user (I mean not a hacker) wants to store his documents in
> > folders connected to special subjects or times. So I think a file system
> > isn't perfect and it is not the way we should go.
> 
> - A file system defines just the above mentioned actions and object nodes.
> It doesn't say anything about the represenation. I think an older project,
> which was unfortunately rejected in KDE, implemented a treemap visualization
> of a file system.
> I think this is the power of a file system approach. You have a defined set
> of objects and their hierarchies, and you can implement multiple view about
> that data.
> 
> A file system don't necessarily have to be some bytes on a hard disc.

Ok, but this is only a question how the data of the modell is stored/handled
internally. If a file system would be best, ok, I could accept it. But I
think we allready have something like a DOM tree and there are not so many
differences between a file system and a DOM tree.
 
> > Maybe this would be also a solution. Give the user the possibility to
> switch
> > very easy between different views on the same subject. Like rotating the
> > whole information cube.
> 
> But what are the different views of a software model?

Look at the current CVS version of Umbrello. There you can see 4 different
views. Maybe there are more, maybe not:

- Component View
- Deployment View
- Logical View
- Use Case View

Steinchen
-- 
Umbrello UML Modeller
Description     : UML diagram drawing tool for KDE with code generation
Homepage        : http://www.umbrello.org/




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