[Uml-devel] what happened to umbrello2?

[Jarl Friis]

Andrew Sutton <asutton at cs.kent.edu> writes:

> 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.

This sounds good. could you reveal some documents; class-relations
ships, diagrams, doxygenerated API, etc. This would make it much easier to
comment on.

> 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.).

Well, refactoring often pays off, right?

> 
> 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.

Also remember to post the URL for the website.

Jarl