[Uml-devel] what happened to umbrello2?

[Andrew Sutton]

greetings all...

as most of you know, i spent the better part of the spring and the summer 
working on umbrello2. if anybody ever checked it out, you'd know that it was 
an enormously large and complex project that just couldn't be done by one 
person - although you can't say i didn't try. hehe.

so, i thought i'd write in and let everybody know what happened to my work and 
where its going. my masters thesis is essentially the creation of a uml api 
and the implementation of a layout algorithm for class diagrams. so, i'm 
taking the lessons that i learned writing the original u2 object model and 
creating a "mostly" platform/application independant uml api that fully 
supports the mof-1.4 and uml-1.4 standard object models. moreover, i expect 
to implement the reflective interfaces for these objects and build an 
standards compliant xmi parser/writer for said metamodels.

the last several weeks i have been working on rewriting the code generator for 
metamodel specificationslike mof and uml. its coming along nicely. i still 
have to write the generation of association classes and implement the backend 
on which these metamodel implementations are based (reflective interfaces, 
common data types, etc). however, i expect that i should be finished with 
most of this in the coming weeks (depending on my work load this semester).

how does this affect umbrello? well... when the project reaches sufficient 
maturity (which isn't _too_ far off), i'd like to see it used as the data 
model for umbrello. unfortunately, it will require some pretty hefty changes 
such (like recoding all the dialogs, the drawing framework, etc., etc.), but 
the end result should be a tool that supports every feature of the current 
uml standards - and potentially some features that industry tools do not have 
(like comprehensive mof support, metamodel extensions, etc.).

i'll post the code for this on my website or somewhere else convenient in the 
coming weeks. if anybody has any ideas or comments, please let me know.

andrew sutton
ansutton at kent.edu